This scandal has provoked many questions that I believe deserve answers.  Among other things, it would seem that information relating to climate change research may have been held back from the public— and key decision-makers, too.  This could of course impact the appropriateness and effectiveness of policy that the US, and indeed world leaders, might pursue.  Before moving forward, given the potentially significant economic consequences associated with some of the steps under consideration, I personally think it is important to get a handle on all the facts, whether they be good, bad or ugly.

Unfortunately, Barbara Boxer and her colleagues in Congress who seek to pass major cap and trade legislation that analysis shows is a job killer take a different view—and have different questions they want answered.

Boxer, specifically, has been more concerned about legal issues surrounding how this information became publicly available than she has been in the information itself. I am not in any way arguing that criminal activity should be ignored. I believe an investigation as to how this information became public is warranted.  However, I think it is equally crucial that we also fully examine and consider the substance of information that has been brought to light already.

Ironically, Barbara Boxer has been happy to advocate for the publication of information relating to the climate change debate in the past.  In July of last year, she demanded the public release of internal EPA data on climate change which she said constituted “the strongest language I have ever seen or that you have ever seen” substantiating that man-made global warming was occurring and constituted a major threat. At the time she said such data “belongs in the hands of the American people.”  She also called on EPA officials to “release every document” related to an email at the center of the controversy, and blasted the Bush administration for “suppressing information.”

So, what is different here?  Well, mainly, the fact that at that time, the information in question supported her position on this issue.  Now that we’re talking about information that may not support that conclusion, she isn’t interested in making sure the facts are available to the American people.

In business and in my own life I try to make decisions and solve problems based on all of the available facts. Ultimately, an uninformed decision is likely to be a bad one, and that is why I find Barbara Boxer’s response to this situation so unacceptable.

We deserve better from our elected officials, just as we do scientists researching important matters affecting lives and our economy. We deserve to know the truth – and to know our representatives in Washington, DC, will prioritize that, even when it is politically inconvenient for them.

Sitting in the chair waiting to participate in a CNN program Monday night largely dedicated to the issue — or, rather, what proved to be an embarrassingly slanted effort at to diminishing it, in its language and approach though to the channel’s credit they at least let me and Steve McIntyre on — I listened to the program’s lead-in. It entailed childish language like that the program will have “scientists and skeptics” (good grief), but also a remarkably insistent emphasis — with nothing whatsoever to back the claim up — on the exposed material being “hacked emails” (with no mention of computer code, annotations, other documentation and the like contained in the exposed trove; now that’s some serious bias).

There also is nothing in the record to suggest a hacking. Indeed,  there is tremendous reason to suspect a whistleblower, tracing back the evolution of the demands for the information, the denials, and the information’s path into the public realm. Yet whichever it was changes nothing about the substance, all of which is found in documents subject to the UK’s freedom of information act.

Which raises the second, ultra-whiny complaint sniffing about “private emails”. Actually, in looking into this I have yet to see one private email. So far I have only found more than a thousand emails subject to the UK’s freedom of information act, discussing taxpayer funded projects and professional advocacy. Someone might volunteer some of these private emails. And computer code, annotations, etc.

Then comes the substance-free hand-wringing that the pre-Copenhagen timing of this involuntary compliance with the transparency laws — which could have been accomplished years earlier if only the hucksters weren’t hiding and destroying the evidence — gives cause to probably better just ignore it all because the wrong kind of people must be behind getting it out into the open. Oh.

Besides, the BBC  has admitted it had the material six weeks before others stumbled onto it, which, given the history of how UK whistleblowers work, also informs a conclusion that a whistleblower sought to get the material out in response to Phil Jones’s latest effort to avoid providing the raw data. That was to claim that he lost it (which doesn’t pass the red face test for several reasons not least of which is there are no “oh, snap!” emails indicating concern among these alarmists that they did look only to see they actually had lost the raw data they had been refusing access to for years on ever-changing bases).

But the most revealing tantrum comes to me today in an email explaining that the fraudster-funded DeSmogBlog wants to take the discussion in the following direction: the skeptics, and particularly the Competitive Enterprise Institute, had the information before saying anything about it. If so that would somehow indicate we have some involvement in whatever process it was — hacking, whistleblowing — that forced at least partial compliance with long-obstructed requests under the UK’s freedom of information act. Because apparently that would impact the importance of what the information affirms. Their evidence is that we were able to see right away what this material signified. It is that self-evident. but nothing is easy for the alarmists. Just as with climate that’s always changing, they are able to see nefariousness behind the simplest observation.

But they are confusing us with the BBC, having the information as of October 12 but also to having sat on it until after others had let the nasty kitten out of the bag, at which point the guy who had received it in early October said he was buys and would figure out what to say about it soon.

This is somewhat similar to CEI, if for about six weeks longer than we waited. Indeed, I’ve checked with my colleagues, and their experience was like mine. I received an email notifying me that the materials were posted on an obscure site, on Wednesday November 18. Then I received another the next day, and posted an item here saying to keep an eye on what develops.

All of which I really think is to say that the alarmists recognize full-well what threat these affirmations pose. The substance terrifies them. It is so damning that they’re flailing about to assign some miscreance to its emergence to tar it. Although as a matter of, well, substance, that would not do so. And they want to do everything they can to avoid addressing the substance. Because the substance dooms them.

Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.’s upcoming Copenhagen conference–which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol–collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama’s magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a “communications” problem, but after Al Gore’s Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor’s New Clothes moment.

In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public–either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails–more than 1,000 of them–reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT’s Michael Schrage, engaged in “malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings.” In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e‑trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, “Please write all emails as though they will be made public.” Small wonder why. It’s being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them “the CRUtape Letters.”

As in the furor over Dan Rather’s fabricated documents about George W. Bush’s National Guard service back in 2004, bloggers have been swarming over the material and highlighting the bad faith, bad science, and possibly even criminal behavior (deleting material requested under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act and perhaps tax evasion) of a small group of highly influential climate scientists. As with Rathergate, diehard climate campaigners are repairing to the “fake but accurate” defense–what these scientists did may be unethical or deeply biased, they say, but the science is settled, don’t you know, so move along, nothing to see here. There are a few notable exceptions, such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who in the past has trafficked in the most extreme climate mongering: “It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow,” Monbiot wrote in a November 23 column. “The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. .  .  . I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them. .  .  . I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.” Monbiot has joined a number of prominent climate scientists in demanding that the CRU figures resign their posts and be excluded from future climate science work. The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, announced last week that he will temporarily step down pending an investigation.

Hayward’s conclusion:

Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s–as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation). Today the climate campaigners want to forcibly sterilize the world’s energy supply, and until recently they looked to be within an ace of doing so. But even before Climategate, the campaign was beginning to resemble a Broadway musical that had run too long, with sagging box office and declining enthusiasm from a dwindling audience. Someone needs to break the bad news to the players that it’s closing time for the climate horror show.

Read the whole article here.

For some time. several individuals have asked why we don’t just initiate suit against the obviously dishonest tactics and claims by the global warming industry under the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO). This law commissions “private attorneys general” to pursue violations on their own, in essence as proxies for the state.

I have explained with intermittent impatience that just serially lying or exaggerating to deceive are not on their face  RICO “predicate” offenses. There must be three instances of a certain type of enumerated behavior over ten years to constitute a pattern in violation of RICO.

I have received an email from someone who has much appropriate training and experience and which causes me to revisit the issue. He writes,

“Well, now it really does look like a massive conspiracy to defraud the government.

When I was in law school, one of my profs noted dryly that once in a while the Massachusetts Attorney General would sternly announce ‘we are going to investigate this matter of ____,’ and the sky of Boston would blacken with the smoke of burning documents.

I bet there was a blip in electricity use this morning from emails being deleted by the climate change community.”

Well, it is certainly true that, on its face this prospect has to be taken seriously barring revelation that words do not actually mean what they appear, in full context of the issue and the email, to mean (which so far has been the principal substantive defense). Fraud is a RICO predicate offense. If what we are seeing unfold is evidence of fraud, a RICO complaint is a possibility, along with what the “discovery” process would reveal. The email and data authors (and massagers, playing “tricks” with the data to “hide the decline” in temperatures) do appear to be true believers in their cause, and often in their data, neither of which is dispositive. They also are candid in ways triggering tortuous arguments explaining how those words don’t really mean what they say. The defenders say the literal readings – that’s plural, not a one-off remark – represent “sinister interpretations” (New York Times), and the implausible is actually the appropriate reading.

For example, we’re now, for the first time, told that calling something the researchers did with data a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures is actually very typical application of common lingo about scientific methods purporting to represent findings. This is the first I have encountered in this context a benign meaning for that. This defense might have currency had not the actions in question already been exposed by private investigations and being, in fact, a “trick” “hiding the decline” in temperatures.

The U.S. taxpayer has much exposure here in the joint projects and collaborations which operated in reliance upon what the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was doing, on the data CRU have been denying access to and recently claiming simply, if again implausibly, to have lost. As well as on the taxpayer-funded IPCC process, and the peer-review process addressed in these emails as having been corrupted with a particular outcome in mind. Also, there are U.S. taxpayer-funded offices and individuals involved in the machinations addressed in the emails, and in the emails themselves.

The plain reading of what has been revealed so far, if the documents are indeed authentic as a blanket admission yesterday seemed to make clear, does give the appearance of a conspiracy to defraud, by parties working in taxpayer funded agencies collaborating on ways to misrepresent material on which an awful lot of taxpayer money rides. In fact, their centers and careers and reputations ride on there being a “global warming” crisis, or at least there being some semblance of acceptance thereof.

I am not yet drawing conclusions on this, but all of the above is food for thought. I will look into this further when I’m back from travel and able to give it some attention, as will some colleagues. We also must confront the truth hinted at by the jibe about the massive email deleting that has surely taken place in the past 72 hours. The ability to permanently delete such material, and codes and other files, is not something I am at all expert in, but an issue on which the viability of pursuing any such actions would hinge. So, hopefully more later.

I will put all of this in full context as more analysis of the revelations and their meaning emerge, but just know this was described to me as “the closest thing you’re ever going to come to a ’smoking gun.’”

If you’re not a global warming geek, the point of the material is that we have apparent — and I only say apparent at this point — written admissions of cooking the books, among other nastiness, by the leading names in the global warming alarmist movement.

Now, none of us can attest to the validity of what has been posted on a Russian server, allegedly by someone on the inside who has had enough (nor can we even be sure of how it was obtained, though it purports to be non-classified data held by a purely public agency subject to freedom of information/transparency laws, even if that agency continues to stonewall requests for access to the data). The alarmists would like nothing better than to pull one over on skeptics, since that keeps them from arguing substance and, say, revealing their data, codes and methods. But I’m told it’s almost 61 megabytes of files, and after a few days of scrutiny by the kind of people who would know, appears to them to be legitimate. And also very revealing, both the data and what are represented to be comments and admissions by our alarmist pals.

If legit, this apparently devastating series of revelations will be very hard for the media to ignore. I didn’t say impossible, they’re fully vested partners in the global warming industry, as catastrophism sells. But so does scandal, and this appears to be the makings of a very big one. Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research.. Then reflect that the taxpayer spends more on climate-related research than on the entire suite of AIDS programs, far beyond drug research.