Matt 24 Watch, 93: Prof Schneider of Stanford and "inconvenient" Climategate questions

Over the past few weeks I have been offline, visiting with relatives in a remote area.

However, while I was away, a scandal now known as Climategate has brewed up, in which it seems most likely a Whistleblower and/or hackers have pulled up thousands of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit [a main global centre for climate research and a champion of the man-made global warming school of thought], through raiding a server.

Those emails and associated documents -- now more or less validated by the university and several leading news organisations such as BBC and New York Times -- raise troubling questions on data timeline distortion, suppression of conflicts among data sources, manipulation of the peer review process to suppress publication of articles by scientists who are not of climate alarmist bent, attempts to discredit such, and general cherry-picking of evidence presented to policy makers and the media. Examination of some of the leaked computer code that processes the climate data to generate global temperature timelines raises troubling issues on injection of bias and on general poor processing. This, in addition to longstanding questions on the quality of the data from too many weather stations worldwide, and on key proxies such as tree ring width.

Wikipedia has a helpful first look summary page, with onward links; but stresses the "stolen emails being investigated" angle rather than the issues at stake exposed by the apparent whistleblower and his or her hacker colleagues. It also gives main and perhaps undue emphasis to the rebuttals being issued, only giving sketchy notes on what the skeptics are saying, without detailing the whys and wherefores behind their objections. So, it is appropriate to link to Lord Christopher Monckton of the UK, who has a blistering summary from his "I have been vindicated" climate skeptic perspective. Also, the discussion on the ethics and issues of whistleblowing here will give some balance on the "stolen emails" issue. Christopher Booker's Nov 28 review in the UK Daily Telegraph on the exposed science scandal will also bear perusal. The Climate-gate.org site has a search-able compilation of the leaked documents, and the original zip -- which cannot easily be accessed from Wikipedia -- is here. Pajamas media TV has significant video coverage etc here.

In short, on the eve of the Copenhagen summit on climate trends and responses, some serious questions are now on the table about he core scientific "consensus." [NB: From various sources, it seems the leakers had communicated the 61 MB clutch of information to major news organisations a month before it was placed on a Server in Russia and announced to the Internet. But, no major news organisation acted on the information, and it took weeks for many news houses to do news stories, too many of which were of the "nothing to see here, move along," genre.)

While I have followed the net news and have compiled a collection of files for future reference, I have been too busy to directly comment.

But now, we can see an even more troubling incident, where a prof Schneider of Stanford has his staff call armed UN security to threaten and expel a legitimate journalist from a news conference; having just asserted [without evidence] that the leaked emails -- in which he prominently featured --were "redacted":



We need to reflect on what is happening to public dialogue on serious issues that affect our whole world.

And, we need to think about what is happening to the public mind when major media houses and institutions as well as a wide cross section of the public support or are tolerant of such strong arm censorship tactics in the cause of agendas they favour. END