The Science is Now Un-Settled

Back in early 2008, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine launched a commission to study the impact of Global Warming on Virginia. “Gone are the days of debating whether man-made effects exist,” he said. “Those days are gone.”

Well, it turns out those days are back. And one of the central figures in reopening the debate is none other than Patrick Michaels, the environmental scientist and former state climatologist whom Kaine defrocked from his post. (I covered these events when they happened. Type “Patrick Michaels” into the search box to read my commentary.)

In what is fast exploding into the greatest scientific scandal of the decade, a large volume of email correspondence and other documents have been either hacked or leaked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the East Anglia University in the United Kingdom. The CRU is the keeper of the world’s most extensive data files tracking temperatures across the globe and back in time. Its data formed the basis for the United Nation’s 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the report before which anthropogenic Global Warming advocates bow, scrape and genuflect as holy writ.

The hacked/leaked emails contain extraordinary material suggesting that the keepers of the data massaged the data until it yielded the results they wanted, stonewalled Freedom of Information Act requests to access the data, and sought to marginalize Global Warming skeptics by keeping them out of peer refereed scientific journals. It’s as if an archaeologist had stumbled across a cave in the Holy Land and unearthed documents proving that ancient scribes had tampered with the Gospel of Mark to support their theological views.

One of the most vilified figures in the email correspondence is none other than Patrick Michaels, a leading skeptic of human-caused Global Warming. As one of the GW high priests said, “Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him.”

The CRU has put out the story that its computers were hacked, thus casting a pall of illegitimacy upon those who would use the documents to criticize the institute, but it’s entirely possible that they were leaked. In truth, the story has been brewing for a long time. In September, Michaels wrote a column in National Review, “The Dog Ate Global Warming,” in which he described the lengthy and unsuccessful efforts over several years of GW skeptics to obtain the CRU’s data . CRU officials gave a variety of reasons for refusing to cooperate. Then one of them confided to a University of Colorado scientist:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.