This month marks the 10th anniversary of “Climategate”—the release of thousands of emails among climate scientists who had been (and still are) colluding to create the perception of a manmade climate crisis, a notion already existing in their minds and computer models but not in the real world.
The scandal should have ended climate catastrophism. Instead, it was studiously buried by politicians, scientists, activists, and crony capitalists, raking in trillions of dollars from the exaggerations and fakery while exempting themselves from the damage they are inflicting on other people.
Few people know the inconvenient facts about the supposed manmade climate crisis. For example, since 1998, average global temperatures have risen by a mere few hundredths of a degree. For a time, they even declined slightly. Yet all we hear is fearmongering about manmade carbon dioxide causing global warming and climate changes that pose existential threats to humanity, wildlife, and the planet. Based on this, we are told we must stop using fossil fuels to improve living standards. This is bad news for Africa and the rest of the developing world.
We keep hearing rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels cause rising global temperatures, but satellite data show no such thing. Computer model predictions for 2019 are almost a half degree Celsius (0.9 degrees F) above actual satellite measurements. Yet, whenever a scientist raises questions about the alleged crisis, he or she is denounced as a “climate change denier.”
A major source of data supporting the human-caused carbon-dioxide-induced warming proposition came from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.
On the morning of November 17, 2009, a Pandora’s box of embarrassing CRU information exploded onto the world scene. A hacker penetrated the university’s computer system and took 61 megabytes of material showing the CRU and outside scientists it worked with had been manipulating scientific information to make global warming appear to be the fault of mankind, particularly industrial carbon dioxide. Among many other scandals, the leaked emails showed then-CRU-director Prof. Phil Jones boasting of using statistical “tricks” to remove evidence of observed declines in global temperatures.
In another email, Jones advocated deleting data rather than providing it to scientists who did not share his view and might criticize his analyses. Non-alarmist scientists had to invoke British freedom of information laws to get the data. Jones was later suspended, and former British Chancellor Lord Lawson called for a government enquiry into the embarrassing exposé.
The affair became known as Climategate. A group of American University students even posted a YouTube song, “Hide the Decline,” mocking the CRU and climate modeler Dr. Michael Mann, whose use of the phrase “hide the decline” in regard to temperatures had been found in the hacked emails.
Since California became a state, the measured global rise in atmospheric temperature has been less than 1.0 degrees Celsius, with much of this increase occurring prior to 1940. Average planetary temperatures fell from around 1943 until about 1978, leading to a global cooling scare. Temperatures rose slightly until 1998, then mostly remained stable, even as carbon dioxide levels continued to rise. Changes in carbon dioxide levels and temperature variations do not correlate very well.
During the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP) from about 950 to 1350 A.D., warmer global temperatures allowed Vikings to raise crops and tend cattle in Greenland. The equally well documented 500-year Little Ice Age (LIA) starved and froze the Vikings out of Greenland, before reaching its coldest point, the Maunder Minimum of 1645 through 1715, when England’s River Thames regularly froze over, Norwegian farmers demanded compensation for lands buried by advancing glaciers, and priests performed exorcism rituals to keep alpine glaciers away from villages. Paintings from the era show crowds of people ice skating and driving horse-drawn carriages on the Thames.
Industry and automobile emissions obviously played no role in either the MWP or the LIA.
These dramatic events should ring warning bells for any competent, honest scientist. If the Medieval Warm Period occurred without industrial carbon-dioxide emissions driving it, why should industrial carbon dioxide be causing any observed warming today? Europe’s great plague wiped out nearly a quarter of its population during the Little Ice Age. The warm period brought prosperity and record crops, whereas cold years brought misery, famine, and death.
Ten years before Climategate, Mann released a computer-generated graph purporting to show global temperatures over the past 1,500 years. His graph mysteriously made MWP, LIA, and Maunder extreme cold years disappear, and it showed planetary temperatures spiking suddenly in the last couple decades of twentieth century. The graph had the shape of a hockey stick, was published worldwide, and became a centerpiece for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Many scientists were highly suspicious of the hockey stick claims. Two of them, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, completely discredited the computer program Mann used to generate the hockey stick’s revisionist history. That did not stop former U.S. vice president Al Gore from using the discredited graph in his doom-and-gloom climate change movie An Inconvenient Truth.
The hacked CRU emails also showed exchanges in which Mann and Jones discussed how to intimidate editors who wanted to publish scientific views contrary to theirs, to suppress any contradictory studies. In one email, Jones expressed his desire to get rid of the “troublesome editor” of the journal Climate Research for daring to publish differing views. The editor was sacked.
When University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke Jr. asked CRU for its original temperature readings, he was told the data had been lost. Lost! Do professionals lose something as valuable as original data? Many observers suspected the Climategate perpetrators just didn’t want anyone to expose their clever manipulations and fabrications.
Possibly worse, when Climategate broke, “climate justice” campaigner for Friends of the Earth Emma Brindal said bluntly, “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.” Not protecting Earth from manmade carbon-dioxide emissions or natural and manmade climate change, but redistributing wealth and resources, presumably according to formulas self-appointed ruling elites like herself decide are “socially just.”
Climate campaigners oppose building modern homes for Africans, with some even saying Africans must continue living in mud huts and avoid the use of electricity and modern farming technologies. Actor Ed Begley has said, “Africans should have solar power where they need it most: on their huts.” These activists and their opinion leaders such as Al Gore, Phil Jones, and Mike Mann are exempted from these restrictions, of course.
Real social justice and human rights mean everyone has access to abundant, affordable, and reliable energy, especially electricity, and not from expensive, weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels, but from fossil fuel, hydroelectric, and nuclear power plants.
We in the developing world will no longer let the climate delusion promoted by loud, radical activists put the brakes on African economic development, jobs, and improved health and living standards.
— Kelvin Kemm, Ph.D., is a nuclear physicist and CEO of Nuclear Africa.
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