Climategate: Falsified Research Scandal Rocks the UK

Written by Robert Romano
Tuesday, 24 November 2009 08:24

"[T]he criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability."--Karl Popper, "Science as Falsification," 1963.

Karl Popper must be rolling over in his grave.

As world leaders prepare to meet in Denmark next month to discuss the implementation of the Copenhagen Protocol (the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol designed to cap carbon emissions in industrialized nations) one topic certain to be the buzz amongst attendees--at least unofficially--will be the growing "Climategate" scandal that currently rocking the United Kingdom.

Apparently, computer hackers broke into the servers of the University of East Anglia's (UEA) Climatic Research Unit. There, they found and published emails showing that researchers deliberately manipulated climate “change” data to hide the actual decline of the Earth’s temperatures.

What makes this highly significant is that, according to UEA’s website, the Climatic Research Unit’s data sets are “widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system.”

The site also boasts that the “Climatic Research Unit is widely recognised as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.” At least, they were.

According to the UK Telegraph, “Around 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents were stolen from UEA computers by hackers last week and uploaded on to a Russian server before circulating on websites run by climate change sceptics. Some of the correspondence indicates that the manipulation of data was widespread among global warming researchers.”

The hackers also published an anonymous note alongside the emails: “We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

Amongst the gems released is one email from the Unit’s director Phil Jones in 1999: “I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.” Apparently, the agenda is more important than the facts.

Lord Nigel Lawson, a Conservative politician and journalist, and long-time critic of the “science” used to justify radically reducing the carbon emissions of industrialized nations, has called for a public inquiry into the Unit’s practices. “They should set up a public inquiry under someone who is totally respected and get to the truth,” said Lawson.

The UK Climategate scandal comes on the heels of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suppressing a paper by Dr. Alan Carlin highly critical of the “science” behind the “global warming consensus”.
According to Carlin’s paper, “the EPA’s “Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act” (TSD) uses data that is out-of-date and ignores the decade-long decline in the earth’s temperature despite CO2 levels rising and CO2 emissions accelerating.

The EPA’s official findings, Carlin reported, are based largely on the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) AR4 report published in 2007. That report’s data, according to Carlin, “is at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field.”

Carlin wrote that the “IPCC projections for large increases [in temperature] are looking increasingly doubtful” in light of “recent substantial decreases in global temperatures”.

Making matters worse for the Hot Earthers, the bulk of the data that has been used by the International Panel on Climate Change in its computer models projecting “climate change” has repeatedly (and conveniently) been destroyed.
And that data was compiled by none other than the UEA’s Climatic Research Unit, as was revealed by National Review’s Patrick J. Michaels in September.

In the real scientific field, there is a principle called “falsifiability,” pioneered in 1963 by Karl Popper. It asserts that “the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” Therefore, the only way to prove that a theory is not true is to show that it is false. For example, the only way fully reliable way to prove that all swans are not white is produce one that is black.

It is now clear to all that the folks at the Climatic Research Unit took a decidedly different slant on “falsifiability.” They decided that the only way to prove that their theory was true was simply to falsify the facts. And in so doing, they exposed themselves—and their adherents—to be nothing more than shameless frauds of the highest order.Naturally, that renders the Copenhagen Hot Earther’s love fest a groundless exercise in contrived futility—unless, of course, they intend to falsify their findings there, too. Which is likely the precise protocol they have in mind.

Robert Romano is the Americans for Limited Government Senior News Editor.