The Hadley CRU emails

The major topic of a lot of blogs is obviously the release of the hacked/leaked emails from the Hadley CRU.

This summation seems accurate to me:

• I have seen the files—not all of them, there are too many—and my early take doesn’t change the view I have already formed: climate models have no skill beyond about one year. The models predict warming, but the warming isn’t there, therefore the models are wrong. Why they are wrong is an interesting question, and worth investigating. Many of the emails responsibly take this tack. And they should.

• I have not seen open acknowledgment that the premise that forms the models is false. That is, that it is possible, even with the observed small increase in atmospheric CO₂, that that gas has at best a marginal effect. As far as I can tell by my early reading, all the folks in those emails truly believe their models (it’s the observations they don’t love).

• There is no conspiracy, as far as I can tell. A conspiracy would obtain if the participants knew their stated beliefs were false, yet the still espoused them with the goal of winning either money, or power, or control, or whatever. My early, and admittedly incomplete, judgment is that all of these people really are convinced that catastrophic warming is on the way and that it will be caused by mankind. Further, they believe it fervently.

Until the basic premise is questioned, alarmist climate change will persist as an ecomyth.

What these emails do is add credence to the claims that belief in global warming is just that: a belief. Moreover, it is a widely held belief amongst many committed scientists. But belief, even that of qualified scientists, is not science: it is ideology. The models of climate are not real, they are virtual. The real climate is the observations and empirical data, and those do not seemingly want to play nice with the warmist beliefs despite their many and varied attempts to have the data conform to their wishes. These emails reveal the extent to which the Team sought to enforce conformity of belief, a consensus on science that by its very definitions is predicated on skepticism and not conformity.

Perhaps this revelation will be enough for the questioning of AGW as an axiomatic construct to commence, which is about all climate realists and skeptics have been seeking.