How They Faked Global Warming

By Larry Plachno

The Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England has long been regarded as the leader in providing information on climate change. In November, e-mails, computer code and data from the CRU was made public by a whistleblower. All of this showed that information on global warming was being falsified and manipulated while true information and procedures were being hidden.

In the following weeks, people have been able to review this material including the UK’s Lord Monckton who wrote a 42-page report for the Science & Public Policy Institute on what he and others have found. What has emerged is a story of hidden agendas, political intrigue, international conspiracy, scientific corruption and contempt for the public trust. It has all of the elements that will eventually make a great movie.

What is now becoming increasingly obvious is that the data that was released from the Climate Research Unit was not random but carefully selected, probably over a period of time. It was also sent from one of the University’s servers. Hence, some people are suggesting that this was not the work of a random outside hacker but quite possibly an insider concerned over what was going on who gathered this information over a period of time.

Lord Monckton points out that the initial mistake of the whistleblower was to send this data to the mainstream media . . . where it was ignored. The BBC had a copy of this data for a month before the story broke on an obscure bulletin board in the United States but they did nothing. Most of the mainstream media has remained silent or nearly silent on this huge issue that touches every human on the earth. They have supported global warming for so long that they have egg on their face for being taken in. Readers should be thankful that the editors and management of The Prairie Advocate are willing to present the news instead of editing or ignoring it.

As ridiculous as it sounds, let me ask you how you would go about proving that elephants fly if you were paid handsomely to do this? You would only need a three-step procedure. Step one would be to collect data on the distance of elephants above the ground, and then “process” that information through a computer that added in a few extra feet. Step two would be to prevent others from seeing your computer programs or learning how they work. Step three would be to discredit or stop others from presenting conflicting data. This is basically what the team at the Climate Research Unit did with temperatures.

Changing data on temperatures is not new. A few years back, a few researchers tried to present what came to be known as the hockey stick graph. Looking like a hockey stick on its side, it supposedly showed hundreds of years of constant temperatures following by a sharp increase in temperature in modern times. This was later disproved because the manipulated data failed to account for the warm period in the Middle Ages, and only partial data was used for the warming part.

Most of the nearly 12,000 years since the last ice age have been warmer than at present. The Bronze Age, the Roman era and the medieval warm period were all warmer than today’s temperatures. In addition, the past four interglacial warm periods were as much as 11 degrees F warmer than the present. In spite of carbon and other gasses in our atmosphere, our current temperatures are cool compared to what the earth has seen in the past.

E-mails between team members released from the CRU at the University of East Anglia admitted that temperatures around the globe have been falling for almost a decade. Team members were unable to explain why temperatures were falling so they decided to conceal this fact.

The way they did this was to take basic temperature readings and “process” these figures through their computers using their own special programs. Data that started out showing level temperatures or even a cooling trend emerged from the computers showing warming,

Written in Fortran, the computer code for these programs shows some amazing and incriminating remarks from the programmers. One program note is so bold to state: “Apply a very artificial correction for decline.” In another program’s code, the programmer’s remark mentions a “fudge factor” to increase temperature data. In addition to increasing more recent temperatures, some of this “processing” also reduced older temperatures to artificially create more of a spread in temperatures over the years.

What all of this amounted to was simply a blatant manipulation of data to show what they wanted to prove regardless of the initial input or reality.

Professor Phil Jones, the man primarily responsible for the surface temperate datasets at CRU has subsequently stepped down. Prior to that he put in a great deal of effort to keep these programs and other data from being made public. There were e-mails between team members discussing how to keep data and computer codes from being disclosed. The reason is obvious; any competent researcher would realize that the computer code manipulated the temperatures and that all of the resulting information showing decades of temperatures on the earth was nothing more than a work of fiction.

Several other irregularities were also discovered in the CRU’s data collection procedures. The CRU used proxy data from tree rings to determine temperature in spite of warnings from the UN’s climate panel against doing this. Warmer weather is not the only reason for wider tree rings. Both wetter weather and CO2 in the atmosphere will cause wider tree rings. There was also a concern that the CRU had temperature stations located at airports, next to roads and buildings, close to air conditioning vents, and in industrial areas that were once rural. All of these locations could create a measurable increase in temperature readings.

An interesting side note brought out by Lord Monckton is the confusion about the correlation between temperatures and carbon in the atmosphere. A major premise of Global Warming theory is that increasing carbon in the atmosphere holds in heat and causes our earth to warm. However, the actual research shows that increases in carbon in our atmosphere follow warming rather than precede it.

The e-mails made public also show that the CRU team had two different standards regarding peer reviews of climate material. They tried to get their own material into the hands of friends and those who supported global warming. In spite of the fact that in many cases their methodology and computer code should have also been submitted and reviewed, it appears that the team was successful in keeping these items away from the reviewers. However, with material skeptical of global warming or disproving global warming, they tried to get it reviewed by global warming people so it would be discredited, ignored and go unpublished.

When all of this became public in November, it was disclosed that the original temperature readings at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia had been disposed of and were no longer available. In addition to being a valuable resource record of past temperatures actually recorded, the missing information prevented anyone from going back to check for accuracy. All that remained was the “processed” numbers.

Why has all of this happened? Like a best-selling novel, the motives are money and political control. One report indicates that the CRU received more than $23 million in taxpayer money to prove global warning. They certainly tried to do what they were paid to do.

However, the second part is that virtually all of this research money came from governments. In some cases, governments wanted to prove global warming in order to justify additional taxation and control through emission limitations, emissions trading schemes, or Cap and Trade programs. None of these programs are logical or justified unless you can prove that manmade global warming exists.

While the CRU e-mails show collusion with other temperature researchers in other countries, there has not yet been enough time to determine which temperature reports from which countries are accurate and which have been “processed.” Preliminary reports from New Zealand indicate that the “processed” data from their National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research shows global warming and is being used to encourage the introduction of an emissions trading scheme. However, the actual raw data shows that temperatures in New Zealand have remained stable for 150 years.

Unfortunately, temperature reporting in the United States is also compromised according to Lord Monckton. Temperature studies in the United States typically come from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. It collaborates with NOAA’s National Climatic Data center that produces its own dataset, which is usually very close to that of NASA. The e-mails at CRU suggest that these groups have coordinated their results and coordinate how they present their results.

Lord Monckton goes on to explain that recently it was discovered that NASA was “processing” information from individual temperature stations to remove the urban heat island effect. But the effect of that “processing” actually enhanced the heat-island effect and increased the apparent rate of warming.

An example he gives is that raw data shows 100 years of cooling at the temperature station at Santa Rosa, California, which is the headquarters of NOAA. However, the “processed” data from that same station now shows warming.

Lord Monckton was originally scheduled to appear at a recent high profile global warming hearing on Capitol Hill and go head to head with former Vice President Al Gore on global warming. Lord Monckton was later informed that he would not be allowed to testify. This sounds remarkably like “our minds are made up, do not bother us with the truth.” It is noteworthy that while all of this discussion is going on in regard to how global warming was faked, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cleared the way for regulation of greenhouse gasses in an obvious ploy to tax and regulate where no taxation and regulation is justified.

One remarkable development of all of this is that there may no longer be a current source of accurate global temperature data. There have been four such datasets, two from the earth’s surface and two from satellites.

The two surface datasets include the one from the CRU at the University of East Anglia in England and the NASA Goddard Institute-NOAA National Climatic Data Center datasets in the United States. The two satellite datasets come from Remote Sensing Systems, Inc. and the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

The CRU dataset in England has certainly been compromised and the original data is missing. Because of coordination with CRU and the “processing” of data, the American datasets are equally suspect. The satellites do not have thermometers and hence their sensing instruments must be calibrated. Unfortunately, they were calibrated using the information from the surface datasets. Hence, their data is questionable because it will show the same inaccurate statement of warming.

As suggested by Lord Monckton, what we badly need is an accurate, globally uniform, unbiased method of gathering temperature changes everywhere in the world. But we also need honest scientists.

Larry Plachno is a professional researcher, writer, editor and author with several books to his credit. His has written hundreds of articles that have appeared in several newspapers and magazines. For the past 30 years he has served as the editor for two national trade magazines. He resides in Polo, Illinois with his wife and family. His email is input@busmag.com.

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