Even the True Believers Had Their Doubts

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Even the True Believers Had Their Doubts
In the wake of a whistle-blower’s release of emails from the University of East Anglia demonstrating the intellectual corruption of climate science, believers in global warming have insisted that, however badly some scientists might have behaved, the “consensus” is so solid that there is no reason to question it. But a review of the emails by London’s Mail on Sunday shows that scientists committed to global warmism suppressed their own doubts about some elements of the purported consensus:

The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now “likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years.”

As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.

Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.

In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it ‘looks like there were years around 1000AD that could have been just as warm’.

Keith Briffa from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which plays a key role in forming IPCC assessments, urged caution, warning that when it came to historical climate records, there was no new data, only the “same old evidence” that had been around for years.

“Let us not try to over-egg the pudding,” he wrote in an email to an IPCC colleague in September 2006.

“True, there have been many different techniques used to aggregate and scale data–but the efficacy of these is still far from established.”

But when the “warmest for 1,300 years” claim was published in 2007 in the IPCC’s fourth report, the doubters kept silent.

The Associated Press, has conducted its own review: “The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters reading and rereading them–about 1 million words in total.” That’s less than half as many reporters as the AP assigned to “fact check” Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue,” a book we’re pretty sure contains considerably fewer than a million words.

The AP’s findings:

E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data–but the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Somehow a single reporter at a London tabloid was able to find the evidence that eluded the AP’s five-man team.

CBS News, meanwhile, reports that “the largest U.S. physicists’ association is finding itself roiled by internal dissent and allegations of conflict of interest over a forthcoming review of its position statement on man-made global warming”:

The scientist who will head the American Physical Society’s review of its 2007 statement calling for immediate reductions of carbon dioxide is Princeton’s Robert Socolow, a prominent supporter of the link between CO2 and global warming who has warned of possible “catastrophic consequences” of climate change.

Socolow’s research institute at Princeton has received well over $20 million in grants dealing with climate change and carbon reduction, plus an additional $2 million a year from BP and still more from the federal government. In an interview published by Princeton’s public relations office, Socolow called CO2 a “climate problem” that governments need to address. . . .

Hal Lewis, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has been an APS member for 65 years, says that he asked both the current and incoming APS presidents to require that Socolow recuse himself from a review of this subject, and both refused.

That means the review will be “chaired by a guy who is hip deep in conflicts of interest, running a million-dollar program that is utterly dependent on global warming funding,” Lewis says.

The BP connection is especially rich. Apparently global warmists see no problem so long as they’re the ones being bankrolled by Big Oil.

Australia’s ABC News, meanwhile, reports that “Inuit communities need funds to adapt to climate change in the Arctic, including measures to build communal deep freezers to store game, an Inuit leader said on Friday.” That’s right, global warmists are selling iceboxes to Eskimos! What’s next, bringing coal to Newscastle?

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