Climate Change Evidence Dumped - A Really Convenient Naked Truth for Supporters of Global Warming -Climate Change Now on Proper Faith Footing says Spoof Psychic.

Climate change is one of the most confusing aspects of science for non-scientists. Supporters are proud of their highly scientific approach. This year's floods in Cumbria were supposedly due to climate change. Last year's early snows were due to "weather", that's different to climate isn't it? With climate change when it's hot it's hot when it's cold it's not! No wonder there is confusion with such mobile goalposts.

Sceptics are routinely grouped with people who deny the Holocaust and good scientific appraisals and measurements by scientists that find evidence against the effects described as global warming are regularly rubbished and called many other names. The shock to all concerned was great, when the recent release of hacked emails from UEA. CRU showed that the "scientists" involved in the forefront of the first "scientific basis for taxation" might have been somewhat rigorous in their application of fudge factors to fit the output from their models to their preconceived ideas.

Chucked out - Just Data day maintenance

"Scientists" at the UEA (University of Environmental Artifice) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their contentious, predictions of global warming have been based. This is a very strange situation to say the least, since data are the most precious thng that any scientist has. We are even encouraged at the spoof to back-up the website now and again.

Any new laboratory technician will be told that his laboratory notebook is sacrosanct. No pages to be torn out, all calculations to be shown, and all data to be signed off by a senior scientist, kept and filed away just in case of problems. In many areas all the regular calibrations of instruments batch numbers of chemicals used and routine quality control analyses must be logged and kept on a regular basis, to prove good laboratory practice in case of problems. Industry probably does this better than academia since it has to prove a lot to patent attorneys and it has to follow ISO guidelines.

Spoof clairvoyant Krystal Boyle said today,

"This puts climate change on a real Faith footing, the same as any other religion. Moses' original tablets went awol, so did the gold ones of the Mormons. Now we have documents and tapes chucked out just because some group of academics thought their evidence to be so evident it didn't need to be kept. However much that may be normal for Norfolk it is not normal practice.

"The writings and mathematical models of a few apostles are all that remain and everybody is now expected to believe them. We shall never know the real truth until future archaeologists dig it up and by then it will probably be in a worse state than the Dead Sea Scrolls. That's if East Anglia isn't all eroded away by then due to the Government policy of not putting in sea defences."

Krystal went on to say that there are no such things as coincidences, most things are connected, and the ways that they are connected are really quite obvious, rather like the Emperor's new clothes. Most of the time if things do go missing just at the right time there is a simple reason for it, usually because it is the right time. Just as when the burglar being chased by the cops throws his swag over a hedge. The cops just have to find the right hedge. Her guess is that a bit of forensic work could possibly turn it up; however, the world of science has no police force so that is unlikely.

But she is not all doom and gloom.

"What does it matter if the edifice of climate change and global warming falls down because hacked emails indicate the prejudiced scientists have been manipulating data to fit and data have suddenly gone missing when their backs are against the wall. The outcome is no different than it would have been if the data after scrutiny had proved this.

"The doubt about their probity will hang over their heads forever,they now have no way to prove themselves innocent and they are more stupid than anyone already thinks if they believe that the politicians will bail them out.

There is always the possibility though that they might be daft enough to think that they have time to doctor the original data if it is still in their possession. If it suddenly turns up later we'll be right to have been suspicious of them.

"This way some "scientists" can resign quietly due to stress rather than be chucked out due to being found guilty of fiddling results. A University has its reputation to think of after all. The papers will find out how big their Golden Goodbyes are and hound them to the ignominy and early graves they deserve for having brought into disrepute many other honest, rigorous, hard-working scientists who will now be blackened by this scandal because it blackens science itself."

Science and honest scientists brought into disrepute

The admission of the "loss" follows quite coincidentally the leaking of a thousand or so private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU's director. In them he discussed, among other things, thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data via freedom of information applications. In a statement on its website, the CRU said: "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data."

Value added is an unfortunate marketing term applied among other things to water from the ground put into bottles and labelled mineral water, which is little different to the tap water we drink everyday. It is also applied to preserved meats which have been pumped full of polyphosphates so that they will retain more water and thus weigh heavier than the original meat did before the process. That is, food and water that have generally been fiddled with. It is indeed a strange term to apply to data. Added value to whom, grant seeking, politicians; or is it just another 'unfortunate expression' such as those found in the emails?

Academics at UEA say they have done their best concerning finding the whereabouts of the data. TV psychic Derick Acorah was called in along with the amazing Randi but no amount of Ouija-boarding, table-rapping or conjuring tricks were able to find them. Only a vague image of a landfill site came into Acorah's mind but he said it looked just like a big black hole. The Amazing Randi was only able to pull a rabbit out of his own arse, admittedly whist in a wheelchair. His place in the exercise was due to an investigation of scientists some years ago organised by a well known UK Science Weekly. A French research group had claimed that water has a memory and thus provided some scientific grounding for homeopathy, another faith-based 'science'.

Climate change less pressing in the 1980's

Dr. S. Windler, head of PR for the University said that the data were thrown away n the 1980's when climate change was a less pressing matter.

The news means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations that are said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. The UEA's CRU (Climate Rip-off Unit) was forced to reveal the 'loss' of the data following requests under the Freedom of Information legislation which the leaked emails showed was an unsatisfactory idea by the scientists involved.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then 'adjusted' to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals - stored on paper and magnetic tape - were "dumped to save space" when the CRU moved to a new building.

However, many people are asking themselves how can recent papers produced after this time by many of the current group, who were "not there at the time the data was disposed of" ever have been properly researched, written and double-checked, let alone peer-reviewed if the original data was not available to be worked upon to produce the publications in the first place? Information must be available concerning the "corrections" to the original raw data so it must be possible to work backwards, unless of course the scientists' notebooks and other documents have disappeared into the same land fill. Surely good science has to take into account that one has sometimes to go back to the beginning and start again. Not to keep data is a rather overconfident approach to science, not practised by many scientists.

Worst scandal in science since Lysenko

Probably, few readers recall the Lysenko scandal that raged from the 1920's until the 1960's. Lysenko made claims that fitted in with the political ideology of the Soviet Government of the time. He was credited with having found a method to fertilise fields without fertiliser and with having proved that a winter crop of peas could be grown in Azerbaijan, thus solving the problems of winter starvation.

Despite the fact that attempts to repeat Lysenko's claims failed completely, Soviet (state-controlled) media reports continued to expound on Lysenko's further agricultural 'discoveries' right up until 1964. Each report claimed amazing successes that to western agriculturalists were quite impossible because few could be duplicated. Even so, with the help of the Soviet Press and the collusion of the Government, Lysenko enjoyed the popular image of a mythical Soviet peasant genius.

Lysenko himself spent much time denouncing academic scientists and geneticists, claiming that their isolated laboratory work was not helping the Soviet people.By 1929 Lysenko's skeptics were politically censured, accused of offering only criticisms, and for failing to prescribe any new solutions themselves. In December 1929, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gave a famous speech praising "practice" above "theory", elevating the politicians above the scientists and technical specialists. Though for a period the Soviet government under Stalin continued its support of agricultural scientists, after 1935 the balance of power abruptly swung towards Lysenko and his followers.

In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences:

"He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists."

The Soviet press was soon filled with anti-Lysenkoism articles and appeals for the restoration of scientific methods to all fields of biology and agricultural science. After Kruschev's dismissal in 1964, an expert commission was sent to investigate records kept at Lysenko's experimental farm. A few months later, a devastating critique of Lysenko was made public. Unlike the UEA scientists Lysenko was an expert at keeping records.

Learning Lysenkoism's lesson

The lesson of Lysenkoism is to realise what happens when science supports or appears to support political aims and ideology and is embraced by the political establishment to justify policy, and political philosophy and ideology. In the case of climate change, these it seems to ordinary observers in the UK, were policies involving new reasons to levy taxes, in the face of diminishing revenues from tobacco, and alcohol and the need for a rationale to increase levies from fossil fuel, directly or indirectly in order to maintain excessively high levels of public spending (which have actually yielded very little in concrete public benefits).

Such brutality arising from a mixture of politics and bad science is not restricted to the USSR but it can be seen not only in the use of Social Darwinist eugenics theories as the justification for the Holocaust, but even before that in the barbarous, inhuman, forced sterilisation of many mentally retarded people in the USA and other supposedly civilised Western countries. What should be recognised as a crime against Humanity was no limited program either, because 65 000 individuals were sterilised in 33 US states alone. It started before the Lysenko era, it did not involve plants but human subjects who were its direct rather than indirect victims. The last compulsory sterilisation occurred in 1981 in Oregon under the eugenics law. There are still other laws that exist under which people can be forcibly sterlised. To be fair, if not in agreement, sterilisation motives were not only eugenic but also based on therapeutic and punitive considerations. Even then, to apply such approaches should require a great deal of evidence for its usefulness, other than the highfalutin pseudoscientific armchair theories of people who regard themselves as other's intellectual superiors.

It can be seen too in the 'Darwinist' approach that has been applied in the last two decades to the economics of the free market, and the resulting financial chaos that we are currently suffering. Market behaviour is the result of human behaviour, a complicating factor if ever one existed and one no economist factors into his theories easily.

When politics embraces dodgy science as in the present case it is an unholy marriage that spawns a devilish offspring of suppression of arguments that go against official lines of thought, by smear campaigns, loss of tenure after bringing pressure to bear on employers and withdrawal of funding from legitimate honest scientists who wish to obtain legitimate honest progress towards some semblance of truth. That, if we take into account the above paragraphs is only the tip of an iceberg of potential barbarity that can be perpetrated.

Climate should be investigated, but it does not have the same urgency as if it were a chunk of meteorite hurtling towards the Earth. It should be investigated fairly and from all sides. If as our friends from Norfolk claim, the original data has been thrown out. This will never again be possible and because of them climate science will never again assume any respectability because it can never be given any by a process of proper data review. We really are back at square one now, all of us.

Are scientists monsters?

Popular literature from the nineteenth century onwards doesn't paint a good picture of scientists. Theses have been written on this subject. But scientists aren't really monsters, they are human beings. They are subject to the vagaries of funding. They have to cope with Governments with no clear ideas of how to run science, except that they find it a rather expensive activity.

They have to cope with public (and Government) ignorance of science that sometimes misunderstands its role as a perfectly valid cultural activity with or without its applications. It is probably human then, that sometimes the importance of some research might get overblown in an environment of competition for too little money. However, for scientists to blame the system for sweeping them up into a situation where they compromise not only their individual scientific integrity but that of Science as a whole, is duplicitous. It is an excuse as invalid as that used by politicians who fiddle their expenses due to an administrative system they know to be without good justification and not in the public interest.


Politicians too are human beings. However, they have much more than most of us, they have ideology and they have power. The mixture of human beings with ideology, and power is a breeding ground for monsters that have no interest in truth or the public but are prepared to bend and manipulate facts to their own ends and beliefs, which if they really exposed to public gaze would not be shared.

_{Make Lynton's day - rate this story with the stars, they're just down there!}