Andy Revkin becomes smiling assassin

The New York Times columnist whose Dot Earth blog became a beacon to global warming believers has joined his transatlantic counterpart George Monbiot in delivering death to senior IPCC climate scientists by a thousand cuts in the wake of Climategate.

Andy Revkin, the columnist who was famously described as “unpredictable” in one of the leaked emails, is tonight suggesting the email scandal could be the catalyst for a major shakedown in the top ranks of climate scientists.

“This whole concept of, ‘We’re the experts, trust us,’ has clearly gone by the wayside with these e-mails,” said Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology.

She and other scientists are seeking more transparency in the way climate data is handled and in the methods used to analyze it. And they argue that scientists should re-evaluate the selection procedures used by some scientific journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the panel that in 2007 concluded that humans were the dominant force driving warming and whose findings underpin international discussions over a new climate treaty.

But it’s not just Judith Curry. In the past 24 hours, senior climate scientist Mike Hulme has confessed the UN IPCC Copenhagen stunt has become far too politicized:

[It] is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.

But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science have become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

The Guardian’s George Monbiot has led with his chin, calling twice now for the resignation of CRU boss Phil Jones:

If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit. I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get. He has a few days left in which to make an honourable exit. Otherwise, like the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, he will linger on until his remaining credibility vanishes, inflicting continuing damage to climate science

I note, for the record, the NZ Herald and some other MSM types and leftie bloggers have taken the position that no emails were destroyed in the end, therefore the crime didn’t happen even if a conspiracy to do so was there.

However, and here’s the embarrassing part for global warming apologists, it appears Phil Jones and East Anglia University have lied. You see, the leaked emails reveal Jones confiding he couldn’t supply information as it had been “deleted”.

Phil Jones, Dec 3, 2008:

About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all.

Yet four days after the story broke, Jones was quoted in his second interview on the topic:

Phil Jones, Nov 24, 2009 Guardian

We’ve not deleted any emails or data here at CRU.

Interestingly in his Guardian piece, Monbiot sheds a little light on what was happening behind the scenes a week ago when the story broke. Regular readers will recall that Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition scored a world exclusive interview with Phil Jones in what apparently became his only media comment for 48 hours, according to Monbiot:

..the university knew what was coming three days before the story broke. As far as I can tell, it sat like a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for disaster to strike. When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU’s opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped “no comment” and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean “guilty as charged”. When I got hold of him on Saturday, his answer was to send me a pdf called “WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999”. Had I a couple of hours to spare I might have been able to work out what the heck this had to do with the current crisis, but he offered no explanation.

As if all this isn’t enough, another senior scientist has called for key players in the email scandal to be banned from the IPCC process:

UN scientists turn on each other: UN Scientist Declares Climategate colleagues Mann, Jones and Rahmstorf ‘should be barred from the IPCC process’ — They are ‘not credible any more’  

UN IPCC’s Eduardo Zorita: ‘By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication’

Friday, November 27, 2009By Marc Morano  –  Climate Depot

A UN scientist is declaring that his three fellow UN climate panel colleagues “should be barred from the IPCC process.” In a November 26, 2009 message on his website, UN IPCC contributing author Dr. Eduardo Zorita writes: “CRU files: Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process.”

Zorita writes that the short answer to that question is: Short answer: “Because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore.”

Zorita indicates that he is aware that he is putting his career in jeopardy by going after the upper echelon of UN IPCC scientists. “By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication,” Zorita candidly admits, a reference to the ClimateGate emails discussing how to suppress data and scientific studies that do not agree with the UN IPCC views.

Zorita was a UN IPCC Contributing Author of Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. Since 2003, Zorita as headed the Department of Paleoclimate and has been a senior scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research of the GKSS Research Centre in Germany. Zorita has published more than 70 peer-reviewed scientific studies.

Obviously, you can read more of that at Climate Depot