Memorandum submitted by Susan Ewens (CRU
13)
1. I was on-line on the night of Thursday
19 November when the "Climategate" story broke
on the internet and I immediately downloaded the CRU emails and
files. Contrary to the immediate excuse given by apologists that
the CRU emails were "taken out of context", it was immediately
clear to those who had been following the dispute with the CRU
over climate data disclosure and interpretation that long held
suspicions were being confirmed in a fascinating way.
2. Within days I had written to my MP, Hilary
Benn, the MP for Norwich South, Chas Clarke and the Vice Chancellor
of UEA, Sir Edward Acton, to protest about the moral and scientific
ethics displayed by the CRU staff in their communications and
their political advocacy of debatable "findings". Now
I am writing to you. There is little else an ordinary but concerned
and informed citizen can do to influence events except stand up
and be counted.
3. I feel strongly about this matter. I
am a woman of 62 with a BSc in Sociology from the LSE. I
am capable of understanding and interpreting data from of statistical
tables and graphs, etc. Until I saw the Channel4 film "The
Great Global Warming Swindle" in March 2007 I went along,
largely in ignorance, let it be said, with the climate "orthodoxy".
This was mainly because I trusted the BBC to present information
in a balanced way. I now know it is the BBC's firmly policed policy
that the "science is settled" and they do not need to
cover the findings of contrarian scientists!
4. But when, in 2007, I saw those sane and
sensible men putting forward an alternative viewpoint on Channel4 I
was provoked into educating myself about so-called "anthropogenic
global warming" and it has been my main interest and subject
of study ever since. I know what the "warmers" argue
and I know what the sceptic rebuttals are. The response to those
counter-arguments invariably disintegrates into ad hominem attacks,
aspersions of intellectual inadequacy and the imputation of low
motives. I have experienced this abuse myself from AGW believers.
So be it. It that puts me in the company of people like Richard
Lindzen, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Tim Ball, Steve McIntyre et
al I am proud of the fact.
What are the implications of the disclosures for
the integrity of scientific research?
5. I know this committee accepted the reality
of global warming and the role of CO2 back in 1999-2001 and
that virtually the whole parliament voted for the November 2008 Climate
Change Act, but you really must stand back a little from this
now "conventional wisdom" and renew your perspective
in the light of the CRU "Climategate" revelations and
the groundswell of scientific opposition that led up to and provoked
them.
6. The Hadley Centre and the CRU are far
too closely entwined with the IPCC, with advocacy organisations
like the Tyndall Centre and with UK government policy-makers to
be truly independent bases of expertise. Scores of scientists
round the world, some of them struggling WITHIN the biased IPCC
process are now challenging what has become effectively state-promoted
and established climate orthodoxy. We are in danger of Lysenkoism.
7. The CRU lies embedded at the heart of
an internationally connected web of government departments, the
IPCC, NGOs, environmental charities, funding/research councils,
universities, science foundations, the mainstream media, the BBC
and, increasingly, energy corporations, big business, financial
exchanges and Carbon Traders. Here the central ideology that I
have dubbed "Climatechangeism" is the dominant and unquestioned
meme.
8. In fact, "Climatechangeism"
has become so entrenched in the value system of certain western
intelligenzias that it has become THE dominant politically correct
challenge of the epoch. Extirpating this dubious ideology from
its entrenched position is strongly resisted by all the vested
interests listed above as well as by the scientists themselves
who have become politicised. This process is evident from the
increasingly confrontational tone of the CRU emails over time.
9. The CRU's IPCC-oriented research was
not funded to pursue Blue Sky thinking about the climate, it was
funded to expose the anthropogenic "signal" in what
was taken as given—unprecedented global mean temperature
rise.
10. I have to admit that I have my doubts
about EVEN that now—given the messing about with "adjustment
and homogenisation" that has been done with the raw temperature
data and major issues over the siting and selection of surface
stations. Scientists round the world are complaining that CRU
has cherry-picked national surface station data and distorted
it. Re Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, Australia, Antarctica and
New Zealand there are protests that raw temperature trends have
been adjusted and/or selected to demonstrate warming from datasets
that show no trend other than normal oscillation.
11. Even raw data is already contaminated
by the Urban Heat Island Effect, in rural areas as well as cities,
because it does not take much of a change in the environment round
a measuring station to bias the thermometer readings upwards.
However Dr Phil Jones says its effect is negligible. How can the
growth of population from 1.8 billion in 1900 to 6.8 billion
today, with associated urbanisation, be deemed negligible? Most
thermometers are sited in these areas of population growth. If
we cannot actually measure the global temperature with accuracy
how can anyone say the temperature rise (IF there is one) is "unprecedented"?
12. Can claimed global temperature changes
of less than one degree Celsius over the whole of the 20th century
REALLY be taken as a serious basis for major upheavals in policy
and taxation in view of the margins of error involved which are
far in excess of the purported trend? Remember, please, it is
only the climate's purported "sensitivity" via postulated
positive (never negative) feedbacks that would lead to "runaway"
change. Surely a little more research money and scientific effort
can be put into investigating these currently unknown climate
feedback mechanisms, before big policy changes are pursued?
13. We are increasingly seeing evidence
that historical temperature data has been adjusted downwards to
create a spurious and/or enhanced upward trend over the 20th century.
Transparency of data and computer code for all taxpayer funded
research is the very least we are entitled to demand. No-one should
have to file FOIA requests to view data. Dr Jones has shown himself
politically compromised in attempting to corrupt the FOI process.
He is not fit to be in charge either of archiving or the adjustment
of CRU's temperature series.
14. Then there is the palaeo data—Keith
Briffa's speciality (and Michael Mann's) most notably the tree
ring proxies for historical temperature reconstructions. How was
dendrochronology ever permitted to escape from university Archaeology
Departments? By some ambitious dendrochronologist seeking to expand
his sources of funding, in all likelihood! Wooden thermometers!
What sane person would give the concept the time of day? But it
got funded at the CRU, didn't it, and in a big way, too?
15. And when the tree ring proxy data diverged
from the instrumental record post-1960 it was deleted from
the graphs used in IPCC AR4 and elsewhere to "hide the
decline" and seemlessly melded on to the instrumental record.
This "divergence" was effectively concealed in the graphs
and never adequately explained in the accompanying text. What
scientists worth their salt ignore such a paradox revealed in
supposedly crucial data? Those who believe no-one will ever audit
their "findings", is the answer, I'm afraid. Another
reason for more transparency.
16. In the IPCC process, where both Jones
and Briffa were Lead Authors, they were in a position to be judge
and jury of their OWN research and did their best to exclude any
criticism of their viewpoint while bending the rules to include
the work of their supporters and, let it be said, co-authors and
collaborators. Thus the whole uncertain pile of "evidence"
for warming was corruptly and artificially beefed up to demonstrate
a degree of certainty that was, in fact, absent.
17. There was too much funding at the CRU
chasing far too few realistic and genuinely independent avenues
of enquiry. Everyone was reworking the same old data bases and
reviewing each others' "research" within a tight network
of co-authorship exposed by Prof Wegman for the US Congress in
2001. Everyone was trying VERY hard to work backwards from the
answer they had been given a priori—that the climate WAS
changing and would continue to change "catastrophically"
and that mankind was to blame. Just find the smoking gun, boys!
So they did what they were funded to do and have essentially ended
up in a fist-fight with scientists who displayed more allegiance
to the rigours of the scientific method.
18. The CRU team went along with the flow
of the funding—at least they never publicly denounced the
catastrophism of James Hansen, Michael Mann, Al Gore and our very
own "climatologist in chief" Sir John Houghton, did
they? They might have expressed doubts privately (at least Keith
Briffa did) but on the whole as time went on they increasingly
chose to decry critics as "deniers", cranks, morons
or self-serving interest groups, whilst probably thanking God
for the long-term funding that came on back of the climate scare
stories that would take them nicely up to retirement.
19. THIS was unforgiveable and has set back
the real science by decades. The result is a whole generation
of young scientists who now think they have to pretend to believe
and promote the STILL unproven hypothesis of AGW. Otherwise they
can expect to be subject to the dirty tricks and partisan culture
revealed in the climate-gate emails to discredit and silence critics
and manipulate peer—review as a process of gatekeeping in
defense of orthodoxy.
20. CRU was politicised from the start of
its involvement with the IPCC. A large and lucrative part of the
UEA is a cottage industry of folk on the make from "climatechangeism",
swapping jobs, swapping hats, moving to and from the USA like
Tom Wigley, Prof Robert Watson, and Mike Hulme. I cannot help
but think that if the CRU had been in a centre of REAL academic
excellence like Oxford or Cambridge that CO2-induced "climatechangeism"
would have been flattened at birth before some bright media-savvy
whizz-kid had the chance to get it out of the seminar room.
21. Had the giants of science like Einstein,
Rutherford, Feynman or Bronowski still been around do you think
this threadbare, slipshod hypothesis that "CO2 will
cause runaway global warming" would have been permitted to
infect the world the way it has? It would have been laughed out
of court. Intellectual mediocrity is the hallmark of modern mainstream
"climatology", I'm afraid. Yet the CRU "scientists"
are represented as the equals of the luminaries of the Manhattan
Project or Bletchley Park struggling against time to save the
world from ecological disaster in necessary secrecy from an invented
"enemy".
22. What overblown self-aggrandizement of
data collection clerks and number crunchers! Most of what CRU
does is just arithmetic, after all, They don't even collect the
data themselves they merely process it. It's not exactly an abstruse
methodology. But their methods are still publicly undocumented
and have been shown to be unreliable and misleading. Look at the
Harry Read Me file, for example, where the struggles of a CRU
programmer are exposed.
23. We have to get rid of politicised climate
science driven by ideologues and cheered on by well-meaning "environmentalists"
probably as ignorant as I used to be. The controllers of the climate
agenda at the Met Office, the Tyndall Centre and the CRU have
been permitted to let inadequate models plus large helpings of
ideology to govern their interpretation of reality.
24. The increasing remoteness of the Met
Office weather forecasts from reality is neither surprising or
unexpected! Many suspect they believe the warming bias they have
fed into their models courtesy of CO2, a gas whose role at the
planetary level has not been quantified despite to repeated assertion
to the contrary.
25. There is so much to learn about how
the climate system works in all its complexity but it has to be
via value-free methods of investigation. The CRU has been funded
with the public's own money, dispensed by ideologues both public
and private to back UK climate research into a blind alley courtesy
of the Greenhouse Gas Mafia. Please censure those who have permitted
this phoney science culture to thrive and expand.
Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent
Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?
26. No. Sir Muir Russell is not sufficiently
independent of the Government/Business/Climatology Establishment.
He is also compromised by his association with Scottish Power.
27. Investigation of the Climategate emails
and data files is too much work for one person largely ignorant
of the field since the devil is in the detail and the nuances
of the emails and files.
28. A team of specialists should be appointed
to work on the case, including statisticians and computer scientists
who are independent of the IPCC clique and its fellow-travellers
in government and funding councils and who are untainted with
"AGW" partisanship. An enquiry of such world-wide importance
merits nothing less.
January 2010
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