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Introduction

The Climategate emails expose to our view a world that was previously hidden from virtually everyone.

This formerly hidden world was made up of a very few players. But they controlled those critical Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) processes involving the temperature records from the past, and the official interpretation of current temperature data. They exerted previously unrecognized influence on the “peer review” process for papers seeking publication in the officially recognised climate science literature from which the IPCC was supposed to rely exclusively in order to draw its conclusions.

The Climategate emails demonstrate that these people had no regard for the traditions and assumptions which had developed over centuries and which provided the foundations of Western science. At the very core of this tradition is respect for truth and honesty in reporting data and results; and a recognition that all the data, and all the steps required to reach a result, had to be available to the scientific world at large.

There are two issues which now have to be addressed. The first is the damage which has been done to the standing of science as an intellectual discipline on which our civilisation depends. The second is the status of the IPCC, since that institution is the source of scientific authority on which prime ministers and other political leaders rely to legitimise their statements about global warming.

The IPCC was established by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Panel (UNEP) in 1988. From the very beginning its brief was to report on mankind’s influence on climate change.

The IPCC has published four assessment reports, in 1991, 1996, 2001, and in 2007. Every successive report has upped the ante, both in the confidence of their predictions of increasing global temperatures and rising sea-levels, and in the surety that mankind is responsible for continued warming.

The Climategate emails originate from the University of East Anglia’s, Climatic Research Unit, (CRU) founded by climatology pioneer Hubert Lamb. Tom Wigley, who was born and educated in Adelaide, was Director of the CRU until 1993 and was succeeded by Phil Jones, who is one of two lead players in this story.

The other lead player is Mike Mann, from Penn State University. Mike Mann leapt from relative obscurity to international fame with his “hockey stick”, a graph of global temperatures from 1000 AD to the present, which was the showpiece at the launching of the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report in Shanghai in January 2001. The hockey stick became a corporate logo for the IPCC , but because it rubbed out the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the historical record, it was subjected to a US congressional inquiry. Eventually it was shown that random data fed into the algorithms used by Mann to produce his hockey stick from bristle cone pine tree ring data, also yielded hockey stick results.

In this annotated edition of the Climategate emails, John Costella shows us how a very small cabal of climate scientists, based at the University of East Anglia and at Penn State University, were able to control the temperature record fed into the IPCC reports and which comprised the foundation on which the whole global warming structure was based. The only data base which they could not influence was the satellite measured temperature data which John Christy and Roy Spencer, from the University of Alabama, had established from 1979 on.

That this was a real conspiracy is beyond argument. The word “conspiracy” is used by the players themselves. In any conspiracy there is a tight inner core and then successive rings of collaborators, who accept the leadership of the central core.

The hero who emerges from these emails is Steve McIntyre, a Canadian ex-geologist and mining analyst, who with remarkable patience and courtesy kept on asking for the data and the computer programmes upon which the various IPCC pronouncements were based. He has performed a great service for the world, which one day will surely be recognised.

The other hero, so far unknown, is the whistle-blower who realised the implications of what was going on and was able to place all these emails on an obscure Russian website.

John Costella has done a great service in making these emails intelligible to us all. The Lavoisier Group is grateful to him for allowing us to publish his work. The cost of this publication was met through donations from the Lavoisier Group’s member and friends and on behalf of the Board I thank them for their generous support.