THREE weeks ago Prime Minister Kevin Rudd named me as part of an international conspiracy to spread lies about global warming. How I laughed.

 

But I’m not laughing now. Emails leaked on the weekend show there is indeed a conspiracy to deceive the world – and Mr Rudd has fallen for it.

 

This conspiracy comprises a group of warming scientists who have been central in spreading the false claim that the world has never been hotter and man’s gases are to blame. It’s come to light after nearly 4000 emails and documents were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK and dumped on the internet by what is almost certainly a whistleblower.

 

What they reveal is perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time: a conspiracy by warmist scientists to fudge statistics, sack sceptical scientists, block the release of data to prevent checking, illegally destroy data, deceive reporters, censor sceptical papers and hide errors in their work.

 

Most extraordinary are the emails in which these scientists admit to each other what they’ve never confessed to the world: that the world is not warming, as their theories predicted. In fact, it’s been cooling since 2001.

 

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change co-author Kevin Trenberth cried in an email to other members of this conspiracy: “The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it’s a travesty that we can’t.”

 

These are not some obscure scientists. Rather, they include co-authors of the reports of the United Nations’ IPCC – which Mr Rudd cites as his proof that warming is “happening and it’s caused by human activity”.

 

They include Phil Jones, head of the CRU unit from which the emails were taken – a unit which Britain’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, said “set the agenda for the major research effort” in climate science.

 

Also included are Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann and CRU deputy director Keith Briffa, both IPCC co-authors, who also produced the two studies which most convinced journalists of the false claim that it’s now hotter than the Medieval Warm Period of just 800 years ago.

 

They also include scientists responsible for the HadCRU data – one of the four main measurements of the world’s temperature today.

 

All this may sound too James Bond-like to be true. Yet only three years ago we were warned that many of these same people had indeed created a network that was distorting science.

 

In 2006 the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee commissioned eminent statisticians to check Mann’s famous “hockey stick” – a graph used by the IPCC to claim today’s temperatures are the highest for thousands of years.

 

Their report not only found that Mann’s work was too flawed to be relied upon – just as a retired mining executive, Steve McIntyre, had first said – but that there was now a “clique” of 43 climate scientists stifling true debate, with Mann, Jones and Briffa all named.

 

Few heeded the warning. And so that clique morphed into a conspiracy which has helped to panic the world – including Mr Rudd – into spending billions on a scare that may not in fact exist.

 

That’s the background. Now here is just a taste of the emails. (For much more, go to my blog.)

 

 

PHIL Jones emails Michael Mann and others about making a graph show clearer warming: I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd (sic) from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

 

Mick Kelly, Professor of Climate Change at Jones’s university, on hiding recent cooling: Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.

 

From green entrepreneur Adam Markham to the CRU, asking for better propaganda: I’m sure you will get some comments direct from Mike Rae in WWF Australia, but I wanted to pass on the gist of what they’ve said to me so far. They are worried that this may present a slightly more conservative approach to the risks than they are hearing from the CSIRO. In particular, they would like to see the section on variability and extreme events beefed up if possible.

 

 

PHIL Jones shows his faith: I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.

 

Jones to his CRU staff: I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020. I’d rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug’s paper that said something like – half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!

 

From Jones to Adelaide-born Tom Wigley, now of the US University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, saying he cannot believe the Medieval Warm Period really was warmer: Bottom line – their (sic) is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years . . . This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility (sic).

 

 

JONES to American climatologist and IPCC lead author Benjamin Santer: I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails – unless this was normal deleting to keep emails manageable!

 

Jones to Mann, just three weeks after an FOI request from sceptic David Holland: Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise . . . Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

 

 

WIGLEY consults others on ousting a suspected sceptic, James Saiers, as editor of the Geophysical Research Letters journal (which they achieved): If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.

 

Jones to Mann on ousting sceptic-friendly Chris de Freitas as editor of another journal, Climate Research, (also achieved) and keeping sceptics’ papers out of the IPCC: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL . . . The other paper by MM is just garbage as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well . . . I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

 

Mann to the CRU’s Tim Osborn and Keith Briffa, offering to block sceptics’ comments on his Real Climate website: Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through . . . We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not . . .

 

 

IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth privately tells Mann, Santer, Wigley, Jones and leading alarmists such as Stephen H. Schneider and James Hansen that the data doesn’t show what their climate models predicted:

 

. . . where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record . . . The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

 

 

THIS does not mean all global warming science is bogus. But it does mean the “consensus” of scientists you keep hearing of may not exist.

 

It means the IPCC reports cannot be trusted to be balanced. It means “peer review” is actually too often “mates’ review”.

 

It means sceptical scientists have not had the hearing they deserve, and leading warmist scientists have not been honest or frank.

 

It means claims we’ve never been hotter are false or unproven.

 

And in all it means that the theory of global warming is too weak to accept.

 

Even Dr Tim Flannery, the alarmist who predicted that global warming could cause Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide to run out of water by last summer, now admits – after reading some of these emails – that “the computer modelling and the real world data disagree”, since “for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend”, and this actually proves “we don’t understand all of the factors that create Earth’s climate”.

 

When even Dr Flannery confesses to such flaws, tell me in God’s name why Kevin Rudd thinks the science is still strong enough to hit us with a colossal tax on gases, and make us pay billions for new “green power” to stop a warming that even global warming scientists now privately concede has stopped?