Scientist in climate change 'cover-up' storm told to quit

The dam is starting to crack on Climategate. A leading environmental scientist is calling for the resignation of the Scientist at the center of the Hadly CRU email scandal.

This shows it is a smoking gun. If it were not, they would be using their usual Leftist tactics of attempting to kill the messenger.

From the Daily Mail:

The scientist at the heart of the climate change scandal was under growing pressure to quit last night.

George Monbiot, a leading environmentalist, said Phil Jones should resign from the Climatic Research Unit over leaked emails that appear to show researchers suppressed scientific data.

More emails came to light yesterday, including one in which an American climatologist admitted it was a travesty that scientists could not explain a lack of global warming in recent years.

In another note, UK researchers dismissed the work of scientists challenging global warming as 'crap'.

Another appeared to call for pressure on the BBC after a reporter suggested that evidence for rising temperatures since 2001 was thin.

Yesterday, Mr Monbiot, who writes on green issues, said the emails could scarcely be more damaging.

I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken,' he said. 'There are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad.

'There appears to be evidence of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a Freedom of Information request.

'Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

'The head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.'

Bob Ward, a climate expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, demanded an independent inquiry.

Computer code shows how they manipulated the data

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU’s code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU’s climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: “I feel for this guy. He’s obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources.”

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU’s Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and “APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION.” Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend – so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!”

It’s not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia’s network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

Note, by the way, I wrote yesterday that I am convinced this was the work of a Whistle Blower from within the ranks of the Hadley CRU.

Looks like I was right.