New Climate Change Email Scandal Casts Pall Over U.N Negotiations

Two years ago, reporters coined the term “Climategate” to describe emails between a group of elite climate scientists that showed them admitting to falsifying data and even conspiring to smear those who dared to question their findings.

Many of those exposed during this 2009 scandal were deeply involved in controlling the scientific assessments of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—considered by many to be the top authority on global warming. They also represented some of the most vocal in spreading claims that carbon dioxide emissions from the fossil energy used to grow economies and raise standards of living were leading to certain climate apocalypse.

Now on the eve of the latest round of U.N. climate talks—the Conference of the Parties in Durban, South Africa—it has happened again. About 5,000 emails exchanged among the high priests of the church of climate orthodoxy have been released by a mysterious leaker. Excerpts show once again an intense effort to discredit critics, as British author James Delingpole detailed in a Wall Street Journal column this week:

Consider an email written by Mr. Mann in August 2007. “I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests. Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.” Doug Keenan is a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. Steve McIntyre is the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose flaws in Mr. Mann’s “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures.

One can understand Mr. Mann’s irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report, and it brought him near-legendary status in his community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place.

The sensible way to do so is to prove Mr. McIntyre wrong using facts and evidence and improved data. Instead the email reveals Mr. Mann casting about for a way to smear him. If the case for man-made global warming is really as strong as the so-called consensus claims it is, why do the climategate emails show scientists attempting to stamp out dissenting points of view? Why must they manipulate data, such as Mr. Jones’s infamous effort (revealed in the first batch of climategate emails) to “hide the decline,” deliberately concealing an inconvenient divergence, post-1960, between real-world, observed temperature data and scientists’ preferred proxies derived from analyzing tree rings?

The environmental lobby’s initial defense of those involved has been that excerpts have been taken out of context. Even if that were true, these exchanges reveal an element of deception that has no place in science and the pursuit of truth.

After the 2009 release of embarrassing emails, a logical response would have been to provide context and transparency to the work of the people involved. But the scientists in questions did not strive for that simple solution. Instead, they doubled down on efforts to trash critics.

Regrettable as these tactics may be, they are not surprising. Witnesses could have foreseen potential for such problems decades ago when these same scientists didn’t wait for credible evidence before rashly endorsing the theory that human activities were the primary cause of global warming over the past 50+ years. Now their reputations and careers (not to mention continued research grants and an elite status in the climate change industry) are at stake.

A condition called “groupthink” describes the mechanism behind this particular phenomenon. Nearly forty years ago, Yale psychologist Irving Janis developed the theory, which explains how a group of intelligent people working together to solve a problem sometimes arrive at the worst possible solution. He also concluded that “loyalty to the group the highest form of morality.” Anyone who threatens group cohesion is ostracized or demonized. And that can outweigh basic reason and other standard principles.

That is exactly what these emails reveal. Critics of the research of this elite group are attacked and their research dismissed without serious consideration despite the fact that the normal approach in science is to prove critics wrong rather than personally attack them.

Whatever their motivation or core beliefs, these individuals have damaged the process by which climate science is published, reviewed, and used to set policy. If the IPCC is to regain any degree of credibility, it needs to begin anew with an entirely new process that is totally transparent and that puts science as the highest priority and politics as the lowest. Based on the past two years, that is not likely to happen. So resources will continue to be wasted as the UN climate change process sinks further into irrelevancy.

Questions of science aside, these emails show that the climate lobby has yet to learn the lesson of Watergate—it’s not so much the crime as the cover up.