EDITORIAL: The global-cooling cover-up

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By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The climate-gate revelations have exposed an unprecedented coordinated attempt by academics to distort research for political ends. Anyone interested in accurate science should be appalled at the manipulation of data "to hide the decline [in temperature]" and deletion of e-mail exchanges and data so as not to reveal information that would support global-warming skeptics. These hacks are not just guilty of bad science. In the United Kingdom, deleting e-mail messages to prevent their disclosure from a Freedom of Information Act request is a crime.

The story has gotten worse since the global-cooling cover-up was exposed through a treasure trove of leaked e-mails a week ago. The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia has been incredibly influential in the global-warming debate. The CRU claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its research and mathematical models form the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2007 report.

Professor Phil Jones, head of the CRU and contributing author to the United Nation's IPCC report chapter titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes," says he "accidentally" deleted some raw temperature data used to construct the aggregate temperature data CRU distributed. If you believe that, you're probably watching too many Al Gore videos.

Mr. Jones is the same professor who warned that global-warming skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."

Other revelations hit at the very core of the global-warming debate. The leaked e-mails indicate that the people at the CRU can't even figure out how their aggregate data was put together. CRU activists claimed that they took individual temperature readings at individual stations and averaged the information out to produce temperature readings over larger areas. One of the leaked documents states that their aggregation procedure "renders the station counts totally meaningless." The benefit: "So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

Academics around the world who have spent years working on papers using this data must be in full panic mode. By the admission of the global-warming theocracy's own self-appointed experts, the data they have been using is simply "garbage."

For global-warming advocates, there is an additional problem: The aggregated data appear to have been constructed to show an increase in temperatures. CBS' Declan McCullagh finds that the computer code contains programmer-written notes addressed to themselves or future people who will be working with the program. The notes include these revealing instructions: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICIAL correction for decline!!" and "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

The programmers apparently had to try at least a couple of adjustments before they could get their aggregated data to show an increase in temperatures.

Other global-warming advocates privately acknowledge what they won't concede publicly, that temperature changes haven't been consistent with their models. Kevin E. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a prominent man-made-global-warming advocate, wrote in one of the discovered e-mails: "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

Still other e-mails document how global-warming advocates tried to silence academic journals and professors who questioned whether there is significant man-made global warming.

We read and reread these CRU documents in stunned amazement. But rather than investigating all the evidence of so much academic fraud and intellectual wrongdoing, the University of East Anglia is denying there is a problem. Professor Trevor Davies, the school's pro vice chancellor for research, issued a defensive statement on Tuesday claiming: "The publication of a selection of the emails and data stolen from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has led to some questioning of the climate science research published by CRU and others. There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the highest-quality of scientific investigation and interpretation."

Unlike these global-warming propagandists, we expect research to be done in the open. Scientists who refuse to share their data, who plot to destroy information and fail to tell other scientists how their results were calculated should be severely punished.