The real question on Copenhagen is: not that the weather isnt changing, as
it has for many millions of years, but can we do much to repair it, and
whether we are just lining someone elses pockets with patchy repairs that
arent going to do anything to the climate, except to make these epople more
influential?. Also watch China and India as they come online with their huge
potential economies. Will they, can they toe the line?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c...the-world.html

Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary
scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree
in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this
astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable
part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound
and fury of "Climategate" - the emails leaked from the Climatic Research
Unit (CRU) in East Anglia - is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked
by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands
of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now
seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted
the world to see.

To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first
necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate
to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU,
his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of
"hockey stick" fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have
been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we
shall see at this week's Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the
largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to
many trillions of dollars.

It is therefore vitally important that we should trust the methods by which
these men have made their case. The supreme prize that they have been
working for so long has been to establish that the world is warmer today
than ever before in recorded history. To do this it has been necessary to
eliminate a wealth of evidence that the world 1,000 years ago was, for
entirely natural reasons, warmer than today (the so-called Medieval Warm
Period).

The most celebrated attempt to demonstrate this was the "hockey stick" graph
produced by Dr Mann in 1999, which instantly became the chief icon of the
IPCC and the global warming lobby all over the world. But in 2003 a Canadian
statistician, Steve McIntyre, with his colleague Professor Ross McKitrick,
showed how the graph had been fabricated by a computer model that produced
"hockey stick" graphs whatever random data were fed into it. A wholly
unrepresentative sample of tree rings from bristlecone pines in the western
USA had been made to stand as "proxies" to show that there was no Medieval
Warm Period, and that late 20th-century temperatures had soared to
unprecedented levels.

Although McIntyre's exposure of the "hockey stick" was upheld in 2006 by two
expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists
at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely
influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and
Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the
"hockey stick", by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa
was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC's fourth report, in 2007,
which dismissed all McIntyre's criticisms.

At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree
rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least
because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct
them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer
the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago
Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had
been after.

This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series
of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies
were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave
those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on
similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than
today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a
"hockey stick" pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary
reverence given to the CRU's studies, which led McIntyre to dub it "the most
influential tree in the world".

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU's leaked
documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted
remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that
he had used "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps" to
"Keith's" graph, in order to "hide the decline". Invariably this has been
quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what
they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree,
the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century
but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann's procedure for the
"hockey stick" (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data
after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted - without explanation -
with a line based on the quite different data of measured global
temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.

A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert
contributor to McIntyre's Climate Audit, known only as "Lucy Skywalker". She
has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of
Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at
all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.)

In other words, what has become arguably the most influential set of
evidence used to support the case that the world faces unprecedented global
warming, developed, copied and promoted hundreds of times, has now been as
definitively kicked into touch as was Mann's "hockey stick" before it. Yet
it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500
politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be
gathering in Copenhagen to discuss measures which, if adopted, would require
us all in the West to cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions by anything
up to 80 per cent, utterly transforming the world economy.

Little of this extraordinary story been reported by the BBC or most of our
mass-media, so possessed by groupthink that they are unable to see the
mountain of evidence now staring them in the face. Not for nothing was
Copenhagen the city in which Hans Andersen wrote his story about the Emperor
whose people were brainwashed into believing that he was wearing a beautiful
suit of clothes. But today there are a great many more than just one little
boy ready to point out that this particular Emperor is wearing nothing at
all.

I will only add two footnotes to this real-life new version of the old
story. One is that, as we can see from the CRU's website, the largest single
source of funding for all its projects has been the European Union, which at
Copenhagen will be more insistent than anyone that the world should sign up
to what amounts to the most costly economic suicide note in history.

The other is that the ugly, drum-like concrete building at the University of
East Anglia which houses the CRU is named after its founder, the late Hubert
Lamb, the doyen of historical climate experts. It was Professor Lamb whose
most famous contribution to climatology was his documenting and naming of
what he called the Medieval Warm Epoch, that glaring contradiction of modern
global warming theory which his successors have devoted untold efforts to
demolishing. If only they had looked at the evidence of those Siberian trees
in the spirit of true science, they might have told us that all their
efforts to show otherwise were in vain, and that their very much more
distinguished predecessor was right after all.