Climategate: the lawyers move in – those scientists are toast!

By James Delingpole

God bless America and – can I really be saying this? – God bless the legal profession! Despite the best efforts of the Obama administration, most of the world’s other governments (save the plucky Canucks), the United Nations and the Mainstream Media (MSM) to sweep Climategate under the carpet, the lawyers are putting this shoddy scandal where it belongs: in the dock. (Hat tip: Platosays) The US Department of Energy (DOE) – under pressure, most likely, from Senator Inhofe – has issued a “Litigation Hold Notice” to its various sub-departments asking them to retain any documents pertaining to the Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia. Below – reports Watts Up With That – is a copy of the notice sent to the DOE’s Savannah office in South Carolina:

“December 14, 2009 DOE Litigation Hold Notice DOE-SR has received a “Litigation Hold Notice” from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) General Council and the DOE Office of Inspector General regarding the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. Accordingly, they are requesting that SRNS, SRR and other Site contractors locate and preserve all documents, records, data, correspondence, notes, and other materials, whether official or unofficial, original or duplicative, drafts or final versions, partial or complete that may relate to the global warming, including, but not limited to, the contract files, any related correspondence files, and any records, including emails or other correspondence, notes, documents, or other material related to this contract, regardless of its location or medium on which it is stored. In other words, please preserve any and all documents relevant to “global warming, the Climate Research Unit at he University of East Anglia In England, and/or climate change science.”

What does it mean? Big, BIG trouble for the Climategate scientists is what it means. You don’t mess with US lawyers and the reason that what might seem an essentially British affair comes under their jurisdiction is because the DOE has provided funding for these scientists. Here’s one example from the Climategate files:

From: Ben Santer < santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >
To: lbutler@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Subject: Re: averaging
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:08:14 -0800
Reply-to: santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Cc: Tom Wigley < wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >, kevin trenberth < trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >
Dear Lisa,

That’s great news! I’ve confirmed with DOE that I can use up to $10,000
of my DOE Fellowship to provide financial support for Tom’s Symposium. I
will check with Anjuli Bamzai at DOE to determine whether there are any
strings attached to this money. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to use
the DOE money for the Symposium dinner, and to defray some of the travel
expenses of international participants who can’t come up with their own

travel money. I’ll try to resolve this question in the next few days. Mmm. I expect you can buy quite a nice no-strings dinner for $10,000. And here’s another one of the Climategate emails from Dr Phil Jones.

From: Phil Jones < p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >
To: “Neville Nicholls” < N.Nicholls@xxxxxxxxx.xxx This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. >
Subject: RE: Misc
Date: Wed Jul 6 15:07:45 2005 Neville,
Mike’s response could do with a little work, but as you say he’s got the tone
almost dead on. I hope I don’t get a call from congress ! I’m hoping that no-one
there realizes I have a US DoE grant and have had this (with Tom W.) for the last 25
years.
I’ll send on one other email received for interest.
Cheers
Phil

Gosh. I wonder why it can be that he doesn’t want congress to know about his DOE grant. Surely transparency and integrity were ever the CRU’s watchwords? But if I were the DOE’s lawyers, I think one of the letters I’d most like to examine would be this one by the CRU’s former head Tom Wigley. To understand its significance you need first to be aware of one of the most contentious points about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) – the reliability of weather station records and the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). For chapter and verse, your man is Anthony Watts – creator of the now legendary Watts Up With That and also of this wonderfully informative site Surface Stations. Put very simply, there is great concern among sceptics that the data records used to support the IPCC’s claims about “unprecedented”and catastrophic late 20th century global warming are untrustworthy. Not only do these records rely on a dwindling number of weather surface stations whose readings have been skewed either by relocation or by the warming effects of the cities which have grown around them over the years. But also, the raw data may have been tampered with by activist scientists with a specific political agenda – as for example we saw in this story about some very dubious temperature records in Darwin, Australia. In 2007 Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit blog had identified serious inconsistencies in one such data record – the GIStemp record at NASA, run under the auspices of Al Gore’s favourite scientist James Hansen. He wondered whether similar rules might apply at another surface record, HadCrut, run by Phil Jones of the CRU. But when McIntyre put in a Freedom of Information request for data on the weather stations used by HadCrut, this was – predictably and quite deliberately, as we now know from the Climategate files – rebuffed. Meanwhile another researcher, British mathematician Dr Doug Keenan had also smelled a rat. His suspicions had fallen on 84 Chinese weather stations whose data was being used by CRU to inform their HadCrut record. In 1990 – as Christopher Booker reports in The Real Global Warming Disaster – two papers had appeared on these stations, one in Nature by a team led by Jones, the other by a US scientist Professor Wei-chyung Wang, who also contributed to Jones’s paper. The Jones paper stated that HadCrut had chosen stations ‘with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times’. This was confirmed in almost identical terms by the Wang paper. Both papers referred to a report produced jointly by the US Department of Energy and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, making a similar claim. As Booker describes it:

When Keenan examined this report he found that it contained information on only 35 of the 84 stations. But the locations of at least half of these had been moved during the period 1954-1983, in one case five times, by as much as 41 kilometres. This not only cast serious doubts on the reliability of their data but belied the claims made by Jones and Wang in their papers.

Bear in mind that Wang is one of the key players in the AGW debate – especially in the field of climate modeling and data analysis, as he describes in this biog. He is professor in Atmospheric Sciences Research at the University at Albany, in New York. He has received $7 million in grants from US federal agencies. And here he was being caught out in a case of alleged scientific fraud. This is certainly what Keenan believed and submitted a report on the affair to Wang’s university. How did the university respond? It carried out an internal review, without interviewing – or even referring to – Keenan, and without giving any reasons, announced that the charges were baseless. For the full dirt on this cover up read this report at Watts Up With That.