Michael Mann and the Climate Change Fraud

On Friday 23^rd August this year, the Supreme Court of the Canadian province of British Columbia in Vancouver dismissed with prejudice a libel action brought by Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, against retired Canadian climatologist Tim Ball. Despite  receiving almost no attention in the mainstream media, this ruling represents a pivotal development in the climate change debate. For by throwing out Michael Mann’s case, the court effectively vindicated Tim Ball’s claim that the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, published by Mann and two co-authors in 1998 and prominently cited in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report in 2001, was a scientific fraud.

To fully appreciate the significance of this, however, one must first understand what the hockey stick graph was intended to achieve. For up until Mann’s publication, it had been generally accepted that our planet’s climate had varied significantly, not just in the distant past when dinosaurs roamed the earth and tropical plants grew in Alaska, but even in the relatively recent history of the last thousand years, which, up until 1998, climatologists had divided into three more or less distinct periods: the Medieval Warm Period, which was believed to have lasted from around 950 CE to around 1250 CE; the Little Ice Age, which was believed to have reached its nadir in the second half of the 17^th century, when the Thames froze over each winter, allowing ‘ice fairs’ to be held on the river outside the Palace of Westminster; and the Modern Warm Period which was believed to have started sometime in the middle of the 19^th century and is thought to be still in progress. In fact, so widely accepted were these three climatological periods that both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were prominently displayed on graphs, both in the presentation given to Congress by James Hansen in 1988 – the event which first brought the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) to the wider public’s attention – and in the IPCC’s First Scientific Assessment published in 1990. 

For proponents of the AGW theory, however, this apparent evidence of a natural variability in the earth’s climate posed a number of serious problems. For if the climate had both warmed and cooled a number of times prior to the industrial revolution, then there had to have been factors other than carbon dioxide at work affecting it. Moreover, this being so, one could legitimately ask whether climate scientists were not therefore obliged, not only to discover what these other factors were, but to investigate whether they were still operative in the climate today and to determine how much they might be contributing to current global warming. As a result, the very existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age not only threatened to undermine the central premise of the AGW theory – that it is man-made carbon dioxide, liberated as a result of burning fossil fuels, that is the primary cause of climate change – but actually risked undermining the science of climatology altogether as it is currently structured. For not only is it unable to answer these fundamental questions, but it is largely ill-equipped to do so, many of the answers almost certainly lying outside its current range of competencies. 

The only solution, therefore, was to erase both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the climatological record. And so that is what Michael Mann did. In what he called ‘a new statistical approach to reconstructing global patterns of annual temperature’, he expunged from history any significant variation in the earth’s climate prior to the 19^th century, replacing the graph shown in the lower half of Figure 1 with the new flattened out version in the upper portion, which shows no significant warming of the climate until the 19^th century and which consequently looks a bit like a hockey stick.

Figure 1: Michael Mann's Rewriting of History

So how exactly did he achieve this transformation? Good question! The answer, however, is that nobody knows. For despite numerous requests from other scientists for him to release his data and explain his methodology, for twenty years Michael Mann has resolutely refused to do either, claiming that both the data and the methodology were his intellectual property, even though his research was actually funded by Pennsylvania State University and therefore by the taxpayer.

 

The inevitable result, however, was that speculation on these matters very quickly became rife, with a number of scientists trying to generate the same results using different methods, all of them without success, thereby giving rise to a widespread suspicion that the only way in which Mann could have produced such a uniform data series was by splicing together data from different data sets: a suspicion which will probably make more sense once one remembers that even in a country like Great Britain, with a long scientific tradition, recorded temperatures measured using some kind of thermometer only date back a little over three hundred years, and that the temperatures of earlier periods therefore have to be calculated from what is known as proxy data: tree rings, lake bed sediments, ice core samples and the like. The problem with calculating temperatures in this way, however, is that while it may be relatively easy to detect changes in temperature within a single proxy series – wider tree rings, for instance, indicating better growing seasons and therefore higher temperatures – it can be far more difficult to calibrate these relative changes within a series to the absolute temperatures of a standard metric. Even though different data series based on different proxies and using different methods of calculation may all show the same relative changes in temperature over time, it is quite possible, therefore, for them all to translate into slightly different absolute temperatures. To get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, all Michael Mann had to do, therefore, was use a data set with a relatively low calibration to measure the former and splice it together with a data set with a slightly higher calibration to measure the latter. And this is what many people believe him to have done.

Not, of course, that anyone was particularly keen to call him out on the matter. For even as early as 2001, the climate science community was already becoming grossly intolerant of anyone who questioned the AGW orthodoxy, with dozens of scientists around the world being denied funding for their research and even hounded from their jobs. Prominent names who have suffered in this way over the years include Roger Pielke, who was forced to resign from his position as Professor of Meteorology at the University of Colorado after a publishing a paper in which he statistically demonstrated that extreme weather events had not become more frequent as a result of global warming, and Judith Curry, who was similarly forced to abandon her position at the Georgia Institute of Technology for daring to suggest what everyone had taken for granted before Michael Mann’s rewriting of history: that our endlessly variable climate is almost certainly determined by many more factors other than just the one currently in vogue. 

The result was that it was largely left to retired climatologists such as Richard Lindzen, Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at MIT, to criticise what he was the first to call the increasing ‘alarmism’ in climate science, and another ex-professor, from the University of Winnipeg, Tim Ball, to challenge Michael Mann directly, famously commenting in a recorded interview that he thought ‘Mann should be in the State Pen, not Penn State’.

Rather than simply letting the comment go, however, Mann decided to sue Tim Ball for libel in the Canadian courts: a move which took just about everybody by surprise, not only because resorting to the law was not generally deemed to be an appropriate way of resolving scientific disputes, but because, to anyone who understood how the law functions, it was immediately obvious that, in order uphold his complaint, the Canadian courts would require Mann to disclose precisely what, by then, he had been refusing to disclose for more than ten years: his data and his methodology. In fact, so extraordinary and apparently misjudged was Mann’s action that it is widely suspected that he didn’t actually realise that this would be the case. Once committed, however, he then had no choice but to spend the next eight years trying to avoid the legal consequences of his impetuous bravado, continually promising to produce his data as the court instructed, but then continually finding reasons not to do so, until on 23^rd August 2019, the Supreme Court of the Canadian province of British Columbia finally decided that it had had enough and dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning that Michael Mann could not bring the case again, or at least not in Canada.

Not, of course, that he was in any way embarrassed or fazed by this. In fact, he was back on television within a couple of weeks demanding that all American universities declare a ‘climate emergency’. Nor has it affected the widespread consensus on climate change, either in the media or in the minds of the public at large, not least because, with the entire court case having largely gone unreported, very few people know about it. Thus while you and I and few dozen others may feel justified in regarding Mann’s refusal to disclose his data as a tacit admission of his guilt, for the IPCC, most world governments and the mainstream media, both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age continue to have never existed, leaving carbon dioxide as the sole factor affecting climate.

While others may shake their heads in bewilderment and frustration at the seeming impossibility of ever being able to get a politically blinkered establishment to change its mind on this issue, however, my own primary interest is rather in how this state of affairs could have come about. How did it happen? And why? Why did Michael Mann decide to commit scientific fraud rather than simply follow the evidence wherever it took him? After all, that’s what scientists are supposed to do, isn’t it? Especially in a field as young as climatology, with so many unanswered questions and so much still to be discovered.

I say this because a couple of years ago I had the good fortune to stumble upon a lecture – which you can find here – given by Carl-Otto Weiss, a retired professor of physics at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Germany, who, along with a couple of other retired colleagues, came up with the novel idea of subjecting climate data to spectral analysis. 

For those not acquainted with this particular mathematical technique, spectral analysis is what is used to isolate electromagnetic signals of different frequencies from a background of ‘white noise’. However, it can also be used to reveal recurring or cyclical patterns of different periodicities in large data sets: patterns which may otherwise be lost due the fact that, being of different lengths, their effects will sometimes reinforce each other while, at other times, cancel each other out, giving rise to a combined data series in which no overall pattern may be discernible.

Now, of course, a data series with no discernible pattern may be just that: a data series in which the changes to the values are the result of purely random influences with no underlying pattern to them at all. Applying spectral analysis to climate data, therefore, could easily have turned out to have been a total waste of time and effort. Moreover, Professor Weiss and his colleagues had no way of knowing that this was not the case when they first started out. What is quite remarkable, therefore, is not only that it actually worked, but that, by using this technique, they were able to separate out no less than nine distinct cyclical patterns in the data, each one representing a different factor affecting climate, with different periodicities ranging from under twenty years to over two hundred years and with varying effects upon temperature. 

They also made one other extremely important discovery. This was that there were no non-cyclical patterns in the data: no linear or exponential progressions of the kind one would have expected them to have found if a progressive increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide were one of the factors affecting the climate. This, in itself, therefore, would appear to falsify the AGW theory. Even more significantly, however – from the point of view of this new fledgling science of climatology – of the nine different patterns they did find in the data, they were only able to positively correlate the two strongest or most dominant with factors already believed to contribute to overall climate variability.

The first of these was the 65 year oceanic cycle – which includes both the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) – during which ocean temperatures vary by between 0.3°C and 0.5°C above and below the mean, spending around 30 to 35 years warming and then 30 to 35 years cooling down again.

The second was a cycle which has long been associated with changes in the climate but which, on the face of it, would appear to have very little possible connection. This is the 230 to 250 year Grand Solar Cycle, so called in order to distinguish it from the ordinary 11 year solar cycle, during which the sun’s magnetic poles invert, the north pole becoming the south and vice versa, a process which is both regular and continuous and which also produces fluctuations in the strength of the sun’s overall magnetic field. And it is these fluctuations which provide us with our first clue as to how solar cycles in general might possibly affect climate. For just as the earth’s magnetic field protects us from some of the more harmful effects of solar radiation, so the sun’s magnetic field protects us from radiation coming from outside of the solar system – usually referred to as cosmic radiation – which primarily consists of free neutrons thrown out into space by exploding stars.

These have a number of effects on our atmosphere. Colliding with nitrogen atoms, for instance, they strip the nitrogen nuclei of protons, thereby turning nitrogen (atomic number 7) into carbon (atomic number 6). They also break oxygen atoms (atomic number 8) in half, creating beryllium (atomic number 4). With regard to the issue at hand, however, their most significant effect is that they also ionise the atmosphere and act a catalyst for turning water vapour into water droplets, which then form into clouds. The weaker the sun’s magnetic field, therefore, the greater the cloud formation on earth, and the greater the consequent albedo effect – the reflection of the sun’s energy back into space – resulting in a cooling of the climate.

In the case of the ordinary 11 year solar cycle, this effect is, of course, very small. In fact, in the current political climate, its existence at all will be categorically denied. According to a new theory  developed by a team of astrophysicists led by Professor Valentina Zharkova at the University of Northumbria, however, these fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field, and their consequent effect upon the earth’s climate, are not only replicated in grand solar cycles but are actually amplified by them, the magnetic field first becoming stronger and then weaker again in each of the successive 11 year solar cycles of which the grand solar cycle is comprised, until in the last three to five cycles, the sun enters a stable but significantly weakened magnetic state known as a Grand Solar Minimum, the most obvious manifestation of which is an almost total absence of sun spot activity.

Indeed, it is this lack of sun spots, which otherwise occur as a regular and wholly predictable effect of the sun’s turbulent polar inversions, that has allowed solar astronomers to record grand solar minima for more than four centuries, the most famous example of which being the Maunder Minimum – named after solar astronomers Edward and Annie Maunder – which occurred during the second half of the 17^th century, in the middle of what was previously known as the Little Ice Age… until, of course, Michael Mann wrote it out of existence.

Given the absolutely fascinating nature of the science which could potentially explain this once universally accepted period of global cooling, again we have to ask, therefore, why he should have done this, especially as by simply following the science, vast vistas of opportunity would seem to be on offer. 

I say this because it hardly requires a huge amount of imagination to see that one could quite easily build a whole career simply by following the path which Professor Weiss and his colleagues have already laid out: firstly by verifying the results of the group’s spectral analysis, preferably with a larger data set, the Weiss group having only had access to European data; then by identifying and understanding the causal connections between climate variability and however many cyclical factors the spectral analysis ultimately reveals; and finally by bringing them all together in a complex climate model which would hopefully predict future climate change with far more accuracy than currently achieved by models based purely on levels of carbon dioxide. In fact, if I were a young climate scientist today, I’d be champing at the bit to participate in just such a programme of work.

It is at this point, however, that the real problem begins to reveal itself. For not only would such a programme be very expensive, requiring a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing fields as diverse as oceanography and astrophysics, but being of purely academic interest, with no obvious practical application, it is not easy to see who would fund it. For without the public policy interest which the AGW theory engenders, climatology as a separate field of research, independent from either meteorology or geology, would likely be accorded even less priority today than when it was first given impetus during the cold war, when the rival world powers, eager to stake their claim to various parts of Antarctica, had to find something for their ‘scientific research stations’ to do there, and so set them to drilling ice-core samples, thereby opening up the Pandora’s Box of unacceptable truths which has led us, somewhat ironically, into the morass of lies and deceit in which we currently find ourselves.

I say ‘ironically’ because the initial discovery made by all these scientific research stations was, of course, that the so-called ‘ice age’ – in the singular – which, until the 1970s, the earth was thought to have undergone during much of the last one hundred thousand years but which most people believed had finally and completely ended around ten thousand years ago, was merely the latest in a whole series of glaciations and glacial retreats stretching back 2.58 million years, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The Pleistocene Quaternary Glaciation

Immediately, there are a number of things you will probably notice about this chart, the first being that it is based on sedimentary data rather than ice core samples. This is because the oldest ice core samples so far extracted – at the Russian Vostok Station in eastern Antarctica – only come from around 3.7km below the surface, which is the equivalent of only going back in time around 800,000 years. Although a truncated graph, covering just this period, would still show a pattern of warming and cooling – which is what was first discovered in the 1970s – it would not therefore show the overall cooling trend that preceded it. And it is to this that I primarily want to draw your attention.

For although it is still almost universally asserted that the Pleistocene Quaternary Glaciation, as this greater ‘ice age’ is now known, came to an end 10,000 years ago, there is absolutely no basis for this assumption in the data as presented, from which it can be clearly seen that the cycles of glaciation and glacial retreat have not only been getting longer over the last 2.58 million years – going from around 41,000 years in duration at the beginning to around 100,00 year in the last dozen or so cycles – but have also been getting considerably colder, the last few cycles reaching up to 9°C below the Vostok mean. Even if this greater ice age has now bottomed out, therefore – and there is no basis for this assumption either – based on this overall trend, the chances are that the earth will still have to go through another 2.58 million years of gradually warming glacial cycles before it gets back to the climate of 2.58 million years ago.

And it was this that naturally made all the headlines back in the mid-1970s when the discovery was first announced: that having just come through what we now know as the Holocene – the brief warm period of around 10,000 years at the top of the current cycle – at some point in the near future – within the next few hundred years or so, perhaps – the earth is almost certain to enter another period of glaciation, the prospect of which seemed all the more imminent during the mid-70s due to the fact that, at that time, before historical temperature data began to be systematically adjusted downwards – something to which I shall return later – the planet appeared to be already cooling, the 1950s, 60s and early 70s having been markedly cooler than the 1930s and 40s. In fact, if one goes back to the unadjusted temperature data from the pre-war period, one finds that the late 1930’s were actually the warmest years of the 20^th century, with the US in particular suffering long, hot summers and a period of intense drought known as the ‘dust bowl’, during which thousands of farmers in the Midwest were driven off their land and forced to embark upon the mass migration to California famously commemorated in John Steinbeck’s novel, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.

With such a devastating drought still very much part of living memory, and the bitterly cold winters of the 1960s and early 70s a simple fact of everyone’s life, the fear which people felt at the prospect of another ‘ice age’, as the newspapers still insisted on calling it, was consequently very real. And yet, still, money for climate research remained in short supply, partly, one suspects, because there simply wasn’t the institutional infrastructure to absorb it, but also because climatologists already had a readily available theory as to why these regular cycles of glaciation and glacial retreat occurred. And it wasn’t what most people wanted to hear.

I say this because although the correlation was by no means exact, these newly discovered large scale cyclic variations in the earth’s climate clearly coincided with the multi-millennial cyclical variations in the earth’s orbit of the sun which had been worked out more than fifty years earlier by the Serbian mathematician and astronomer, Milutin Milankovitch.

The Milankovitch cycles, as they are called, describe three separate aspects of the earth’s solar orbit:

1. The shape of the orbit, itself, which, being acted upon by the gravitational pull of the other planets in the solar system – particularly Jupiter and Saturn – is not constant, being more acutely elliptical at some times than others. Even more significantly, as a further consequence of these gravitational distortions, the sun itself is rarely at the centre of the ellipse, usually being closer to one end – known as the perihelion – than the other – known as the aphelion – with the result that the distance between the earth and the sun varies by up to five million miles.
2. The difference between the length of the sidereal year – the time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun once – and the calendar year, as measured from midwinter solstice to midwinter solstice and caused by the earth’s wobble on its axis. It may not seem much, but the sidereal year is twenty minutes longer than the calendar year, which means that every calendar year it slips back another twenty minutes from its starting point: a phenomenon known as precession. What this also means, therefore, is that the northern hemisphere’s winters occur at different places in the elliptical orbit, sometimes – for a few thousand years in a row – occurring in the perihelion, when the winters are consequently quite mild, and sometimes – also for a few thousand years in a row – occurring in the aphelion, when the winters are significantly colder.
3. The variation in the earth’s axial tilt or obliquity, which ranges from 21.1° to 24.5° and means that during some northern hemisphere winters, the earth is actually pointing further away from the sun than in others. If this happens when the winters are occurring in the aphelion, this therefore makes them even colder.

You will, of course, have noted that I speak here specifically of the northern hemisphere. This is because the land in the northern hemisphere is significantly closer to the polar ice cap than it is in the southern hemisphere. Even though the south pole is actually on land, the Antarctic sea ice would have to leap across hundreds of miles of heat-retaining ocean in order to reach South America, South Africa or Australia. For the Arctic sea ice to claim northern Canada, Siberia and northern Scandinavia, in contrast, it wouldn’t have to move very far south at all. Indeed, it already reaches these northern outposts of the three closest continents each and every winter, blocking any Arctic seaway, and would therefore only require a few cold summers, in which it failed to retreat, for a new period of glaciation to begin.

Despite the undisputed soundness of Milankovitch’s astronomical calculations and the clear if only approximate correlation between the earth’s ever changing solar orbit and the cyclical patterns in its multi-millennial climate history, it is not surprising, therefore, that no government in the world was particularly keen on giving scientists money to study this relationship further and thereby provide a more precise date as to when the next period of glaciation would actually begin. For if, as the Milankovitch cycles suggested, the earth’s climate is driven by gravitational forces far beyond the control of any human being, then there was absolutely nothing any government in the world could do about it. Giving people a more accurate forecast as to when an ice sheet a mile thick was going to descend upon North America and Europe would therefore have achieved nothing other than to foster despondency and a total loss of will to do anything constructive. For make no mistake, another period of glaciation like the last one, with a drop in global average temperatures of 9°C, would mean the death of billions of people, if not the whole of human civilization.

In the early 1980s, when governments would have been agonizing over what, if anything, they should do about this problem, it must have seemed like mana from heaven, therefore, when NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), under the directorship of James Hanson, revived a long-abandoned theory, first put forward by the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius in 1896, which promised a possible solution. For due to the so-called Greenhouse Gas Effect, Arrhenius had posited that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide which the world had been experiencing ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution, should actually lead to an increase in global temperatures, which Hanson now suggested might be sufficient to counteract the effects of the Milankovitch cycles and hence remove this looming threat.

What Hanson and his colleagues at NASA GISS failed to inform the world, however, is why Arrhenius’ theory had been so long abandoned. Whether or not this was intentional, they entirely neglected to mention the fact that, in 1901, just five years after the theory’s publication, it had been utterly debunked by another Swedish physicist, Knut Ångström, who empirically demonstrated that, due to the limited number of signature wave-lengths at which infra-red radiation is absorbed by carbon dioxide, and the further fact that most of these wave lengths are also absorbed by water vapour, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide could not have anywhere near the effect upon climate that Arrhenius had claimed. Using an infrared camera, which Ångström himself had developed, what he discovered, in fact, was that:

1.  at the shorter wavelengths absorbed by carbon dioxide – those which are also absorbed by the thirty times more plentiful water vapour – all of the infra-red radiation re-emitted by the sun-warmed earth is already absorbed by latter, such that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere has no effect on climate whatsoever, while
2. at the longer wavelengths, at which carbon dioxide uniquely absorbs infra-red radiation, the much lower temperatures of the objects from which the radiation is emitted means that the effect is minimal.

Unfortunately, it seems that to governments in the mid-1980s the actual science was not their primary concern. They were happy merely to be assured that they were no longer facing an end-of-the-world catastrophe over which they had no control. As a consequence, they still didn’t really question the science even when they were told that man-made global warming might not merely counteract the effects of the Milankovitch Cycles, but might, in itself, be a threat to the planet. After all, this was something they could control. They could systematically reduce their nations’ carbon dioxide emissions and even gain popularity as a result of their virtuous actions in ‘saving the planet’.

And so the taps were opened and the money flowed, especially in America and the UK, where climate research very quickly became big business. In the UK, for instance, the two largest centres of the science are the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of Exeter, which also houses the UK meteorological office, and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which, between them, employ more than three hundred scientists – along with their associated administrative and auxiliary staff – and jointly produce the highly influential HadCRUT dataset, which is used by the IPCC in its scientific assessment reports, and from which an equally influential version of the GAST or Global Average Surface Temperature is derived.

To those unfamiliar with the way in which climate science is currently conducted, this concept of the GAST, and the fact that it needs to be calculated, will probably require some explanation. After all, most people probably imagine that, these days, the earth’s atmospheric temperature is measured from space. As indeed it is. Since 1978, microwave sounding units (MSUs) on polar orbiting satellites, controlled by America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have measured the intensity of microwave radiation emitted by atmospheric oxygen, from which the temperature of  different layers in the atmosphere can be calculated. Not only are these stratified atmospheric temperatures all significantly cooler than the earth’s surface temperature, however, but, as stated, they only go back to 1978. And as with proxy data, one cannot mix and match datasets. If one wants a longer historical record – one dating back to 1850, for instance, as in the case of the HadCRUT dataset – one therefore has to go back to surface temperature records measured in the old-fashioned way, with a thermometer.

The trouble is, of course, that if one’s objective is to obtain is a global average surface temperature, this enforced methodology, in itself, presents a number of almost insurmountable challenges. The first and most obvious is that weather stations are not evenly distributed about the globe, with far more in Europe and North America than in Africa, Asia and South America, and hardly any at all, in fact, in most of the more inhospitable but climatically critical parts of the world, such as northern Siberia and the Sahara Desert. Just as importantly, this is also reflected historically, with less and less records having been kept outside of Europe and North America the further one goes back in time. In fact, during the first four years of the HadCRUT dataset, from 1850 to 1853, there is only one actual data point in the whole of the southern hemisphere, in Indonesia as it happens.

So how do you calculate a global average surface temperature from such a paucity of actual data? Well it’s a bit like playing a game of Sudoku. Firstly, you divide the world up into a grid of equal sized areas. Then you fill in the average temperatures for those areas for which you have actual data. Then you take two areas for which you have data and extrapolate values for the areas in between. How? Unfortunately this is not made public. For just as in the case of Michael Mann’s data and methodology, the institutions which undertake this work, although publicly funded, claim that their algorithms are proprietary and the primary source of their income, which they therefore have a right to protect.

One can, however, make some educated guesses as to the kind of variables these algorithms would have to include. Take, for example, two areas on the grid – call them A and B – which differ in average temperature by 2°C and which are separated by four dataless areas. The simplest way to extrapolate the average temperatures for these transitional areas would therefore be to divide 2°C by four and assume that the temperature increases by 0.5°C in each of the areas one passes through in moving from the colder area A to the warmer area B. Immediately, however, one can see a number of problems with this. Is the difference in the average temperature between A and B caused by a difference in altitude, for instance? And if so, is the gradient constant? Or is the difference between A and B due to the fact that one is in an urban area while the other is in the countryside, urban areas generally being two or three degrees warmer than rural ones? If so, how far does the urban heat island effect (UHIE) radiate into the countryside? And what happens if one combines these two possibilities? Suppose that both A and B are urban areas at different altitudes, with colder countryside in between. How does one calculate these values?

Not, of course, that this particular example is mathematically very difficult. And I certainly don’t mean to say that the people who work on these problems don’t generally get the answers right or that they are not empirically verified wherever possible. There are, however, areas of the world where the factors affecting the local climate are not only far more complex than in the above example, but where that complexity itself not only produces the kind of inhospitable environment where human habitation and hence weather stations are a rarity, but where it is also that much more difficult to verify their assumed effects.

Take the world’s oceans, for instance, which cover 71% of the planet’s surface and which have such a complex thermodynamic interaction with the atmosphere that even after decades of oceanic-atmospheric studies, meteorologists still find it difficult to predict the development and course of hurricanes with any certainty. What’s more, meteorologists do not have to rely on tethered coastal buoys or ships to feed them surface temperature data in the way that climatologists do.

Then there are the world’s deserts which, due to a lack of water vapour in the atmosphere, experience dramatic drops in temperature when not subjected to direct sunlight. Or the world’s tropical rain forests which, due to their extreme humidity, hardly experience any change in temperature at all whether it be day or night. If you look at maps showing the locations of the worlds weather stations, however, deserts and rain forests hardly figure at all, meaning that whatever changes in temperature these regions of the world experience are nearly all extrapolated from somewhere else: somewhere else that almost certainly does not have these same extreme climatic conditions.

Even more worrying is the fact that, just as in a game of Sudoku, extrapolated data points become data points from which other data points are then extrapolated, such that any error in calculating the value for one particular area can spread and even be amplified across the matrix: a fact which, I suspect, would have scientists in many other fields raising a sceptical eyebrow, especially as we are not allowed to see the algorithms by which these calculated values are generated. Indeed, it’s highly likely that there would be a good many scientists in other disciplines who would not only question the scientific soundness of this whole endeavour but would likely wonder at how it could receive so much public founding while being subject to so little public scrutiny.

Indeed, it is a question which, I suspect, a good many more people will have started asking in the last few months, following the publication of the work of an Australian PhD student called John McLean, whom the guardians of the HadCRUT dataset inexplicably allowed to audit HadCRUT4, the fourth and latest version of their dataset.

Presumably, as a humble PhD student, the senior management at the Hadley Centre and the CRU thought that McLean posed no threat. Unfortunately for them, he found a publisher who was not only willing but eager to publish his findings, which detailed over seventy serious errors in the data.
Admittedly, most of these were just simple mistakes. But even as such, they demonstrate a casualness on behalf of the scientists involved which one would not have expected from people processing such supposedly significant information, especially given that many of the mistakes are so glaring.

By way of a few examples, there are two separate months, for instance, when the measured or calculated average temperature for the Caribbean islands of St. Kitts is recorded as being 0°C. For the whole month of September 1953, to take another example, a town in Romania was supposed to have experienced an average temperature of minus 46°C: the usual average temperature for that month being plus 10°C. Then there is the temperature data recorded by ships at sea, the geographical coordinates of which are logged as being up to two hundred miles inland. In fact, reading this catalogue of glaringly obvious errors, it is almost as if none of the data was ever actually checked or subjected to quality control, which in turn quite naturally leads one to question the quality of the systems and processes by which it is amassed.

Bad as these individual errors are, however, they are as nothing compared to the numerous systematic adjustments to which the data is subjected, especially with respect to the Urban Heat Island Effect, which is largely a 20^th century phenomenon. This is because modern building materials – bricks, concrete and tarmac – are much better at absorbing and storing heat than those which they replaced – stone, wood and cobbles. With the advent of central heating, buildings also started to be heated to much higher levels, and although this coincided with an improvement in insulation, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, all this additional heat always eventually leaks out into the colder surrounding environment, thereby warming it: something which those responsible for weather stations in urban areas, especially at universities and other places of learning, gradually began to recognise as the century progressed.

As a consequence, they therefore slowly began to move these weather stations into more rural areas or any green, open space the school or university happened to own, sports fields being a very popular choice. The result was that average temperatures recorded by these weather stations in the year immediately following their relocation usually and often quite dramatically fell. Instead of assuming that the temperature rise at the previous location had been gradual over a number of years, however, what John McLean discovered was that the compilers of the HadCRUT dataset assumed rather that the older temperatures had always been overstated by the difference recorded in the year of relocation. Instead of adjusting the figures downward on a gradual basis, therefore, they deducted the entire difference from the whole data history of the weather station in question, effectively cooling the past by far more than any reasonable person would regard as warranted.

Nor are the scientists at the Hadley Centre and the CRU alone in this practice. Over the last couple of decades, the same adjustments have been systematically made to the datasets compiled by NASA GISS and the NOAA. Indeed, it is how these institutions, working together, managed to eradicate the warmer years of the 1930s and 40s. Even more importantly, it is also how they have managed to maintain their elevated level of public funding. For in order to keep the money spigots open, the climate science establishment, as a community of institutions, know that they have to keep public concern over climate change at a critical level. For all these institutions, therefore, it is imperative that anything which brings the AGW narrative into question – even the slightest hint that other factors might be involved in climate variability – has to be suppressed.

Shocking as this is, however, the real problem is that the corruption does not stop at the laboratory gates. If it did, it would just be a minor scam. Having embraced the AGW narrative, however, governments around the world have had to make good on their implicit commitment to do something about it, and there have been plenty of other scam artists out there who have been than more than willing to help them: crony capitalists who have no problem accepting public grants and subsidies in return for largely bogus promises of limitless clean energy produced from non-viable technologies which are otherwise so far from being economic that, during their lifetime, they barely recoup the energy expended in their manufacture, installation and maintenance. Worse still, in order to fund these grants and subsidies, both taxes and electricity prices have to be increased for both consumers and businesses alike, thereby suppressing demand in other parts of the economy, while the intermittent nature of the energy produced by wind and solar farms is a constant threat to the stability of any electricity grid which is forced to rely on them, eventually giving rise to power outages which are even more economically damaging.

At the same time, demands that we eliminate the use of fossil fuels for transport have forced an already depressed automotive industry to scrap billions of dollars of cumulative investment in internal combustion technologies while investing even more billions in the development of alternative electric vehicles for which there is currently little to no existing refueling infrastructure and insufficient electricity available to power one even if there were, our generating capacity having already become too degraded by the green energy revolution. And to cap it all, it is now being discovered that, because of their lithium ion batteries, electric cars are not nearly as safe as everyone imagined, having a tendency to suddenly burst into flames should any of their battery casings become compromised, allowing the lithium inside to come into contact with the oxygen in the air and causing them to explode.

But surely, you say, governments employ engineers and economists to advise them on these matters. If the direction in which we are currently headed were as misguided and ill-conceived as I say it is, then surely they would have been told. And you are right, they probably have been. It’s just that no politician hoping to be re-elected could ever repeat any of this advice, let alone base their policies on it, while many of them almost certainly choose to cynically profess a belief in a post-fossil-fuel world in order to appeal to that small but extremely vocal part of the electorate with whom it most resonates: the idealistic but largely directionless graduates of our post-modernist education system for whom the traditional aspirations of getting married, raising a family and owning their own home now seem as anachronistic and ideologically defective as they are economically unattainable. When set beside the yawning chasm of nihilistic emptiness which otherwise beckons, to many of this generation the idea of ‘saving the planet’ has thus become the one thing they can cling to: not just as an indubitably good cause to which they can devote themselves entirely without further need of reason or justification, but as something which, in its very purposefulness, offers them salvation.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the climate change movement has often been compared to a religious cult. For like a religious cult it gives meaning to its followers’ lives. Based on such an abstruse foundation, however – the actual physics of which few of its followers even claim to understand – it also engenders the kind of anxiety which naturally comes with the possibility that this ‘meaning’ could at any time be undermined by some random sceptical thought, and which in turn therefore fosters an almost hysterical hostility towards any dissenting voice. Like heretics in the middle ages, ‘deniers’ must consequently be silenced by any means possible, whether that means de-platforming them and banning them from any form of media, or removing them from any office they may hold, especially if that office involves any form of teaching.

What is most disturbing about this descent into mob rule, however, is not just the rejection of disinterested enquiry and reasoned debate – or even the existential malaise which it clearly signifies – but the fact that, unlike in the middle ages, and the centuries of ever-increasing enlightenment which followed, science may no longer be able to come to our rescue. For by abandoning actual science in favour of whatever narrative would garner public funding, scientists like Michael Mann have not only subverted their own disciple and weakened the status of science in general, but have undermined the entire epistemological foundation upon which the modern world is built: a principled and determined commitment to basing our beliefs solely upon empirical evidence and reasoned argument, which, until now, has kept our feet firmly on the ground and our beliefs tethered to reality, and without which all manner of fantasy, delusion and madness is made possible, including, it seems, the belief that a colourless, odourless gas, which comprises just 0.04% of the atmosphere and is essential to all life on earth, is actually a pollutant born of our nature-despoiling original sin, which, unless we recant and mend our ways, will eventually see us all burning in hell or plunged beneath the waters of a second great flood.

It is thus for his contribution to ushering in this new dark age of ignorance and superstition that Michael Mann is most culpable. And it is for this, therefore, that he cannot be forgiven.