HH: Well, let’s turn to the serious story of the week. I think this is potentially very serious, and that is the leaked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Eastern England. I’m quoting from CBS now, “In global warming circles, the CRU weighs outside influence. It claims the world’s largest temperature data set, and it’s work in mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report”
MS: Yeah.
HH: What’s the significance of the hackers’ foray?
MS: Well, it’s very significant. My colleague, Iain Murray, put it this way. He says that the CRU is basically the Pentagon of the climate change business, and these are the Pentagon papers. And that’s basically true. It’s the clearing house for a climate change orthodoxy. So everything from Kyoto, Copenhagen, the IPCC, as you mentioned, the cap and trade monstrosity in Congress, all depends on figures that have been run through the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia. And as we now see, not so much from the e-mails, but from the actual code, the code, the computer code they’re using, it’s garbage. I quote at random. For example, this is one example of the computer code there. “Specified period over which to compute the regressions. Stop in 1960 to avoid the decline that affects tree ring density records.” So in other words, the computer code that they’re producing these numbers with is rigged and distorted, and what they want to do at Copenhagen is tax you up to the hilt to pay for this racket.
HH: Is it fair to say, Mark Steyn, that everything that the tobacco companies were ever accused of doing with data about cigarettes is now true about the CRU and its global warming data?
MS: Yeah, that’s absolutely, that is actually a good way to put it. I mean, I think this idea…they’ve corrupted the very essence of science. They’ve corrupted peer review, they’ve had editors from journals fired who disagree with them, they’ve corrupted the data. They basically are the antithesis of science. They decide the result, and then figure out how you need to set up the computer model to get the result. This is disgraceful. And if Phil Jones at East Anglia, and his colleague, Michael Mann at Penn State University over here, if they survive this scandal, then there is no reason why anybody paying even a minimal bit of attention should take climate change seriously ever again. They need, if the climate change movement is serious, it will expel Phil Jones in East Anglia, and Michael Mann from Penn State University from their ranks.
HH: Now Mark, Science Magazine has published an article noting that deleting e-mail messages in anticipation of a FOIA request in the United Kingdom is a crime, and that’s what they were doing.
MS: Yes. I mean, I think this is the interesting thing to me.
HH: (laughing)
MS: I mean, their basic position, if you get a Freedom Of Information Act request, and you delete that material, you’ve committed a crime. So the British police ought to be in that building finding out what’s happened to this, finding out what’s happened to this stuff. Their position is look, we did all this research. Why should we give it away to our enemies for free? Well sorry, that’s the way it works. You’re saying, for a start, you’re getting government money. You’re getting billions and billions and billions to come up with this stuff. And what you’re doing is you’re saying that on the basis of your research, we should tax the hell out of everybody in the developed world, and make them change the way they live. And the least that those of us on the receiving end of that racket are entitled to is to be able to see the raw data on which these cockamamie graphs were based.
Steyn, como siempre genial. Id y leed todo.
Muy claro.
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