The warming period is said to have improved agriculture and increased life spans, but scientists at the center of the Climategate e-mail scandal believed the era undermined their goal of spreading concern about global warming as it pertains to today's climate.

Solomon noted the warming period presented a dilemma long before the Climategate e-mail scandal.

A 1995 e-mail predating the recent Climate Research Unit scandal was sent to geophysicist David Deming. A major climate-change researcher told Deming, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

Some scientists later expressed concern about erasing the period.

One chief practitioner identified as Keith Briffa, said in a Sept. 22, 1999, e-mail, "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago."

Briffa and other scientists, with the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published a well-known symbol of their movement: the hockey stick chart, an illustration reproduced in textbooks, media reports and the pages of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report.

However, the graph showed stable temperatures over the last 1,000 years and omitted any indication of the warming period.

"But the U.N.'s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had," Solomon wrote. "Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn't have if they were to save the globe from warming."

Instead, the group created a website called RealClimate.org. One e-mail addressed criticism of the hockey stick graph and any suggestions that today's temperatures were not the hottest on record.

"The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly 'bombshell' papers that are doing the rounds" in aid of "combating dis-information," a Dec. 10, 2004, e-mail to the Climate Research Unit from Gavin Schmidt explained.

The RealClimate.org team consisted of Schmidt, Mike Mann, Eric Steig, William Connolley, Stefan Rahmstorf, Ray Bradley, Amy Clement, Rasmus Benestad and Caspar Ammann.

Solomon revealed that Connolley, one man in the nine-member team who is a U.K. scientist, a software engineer and Green Party activist, took control of Wikipedia's entries to see that any trace of the true climate history would be erased.

Beginning in February 2003, Connolley rewrote Wikipedia entries on global warming, the greenhouse effect, the instrumental temperature record, the urban heat island, on climate models and on global cooling, according to the report. In February, he began editing the Little Ice Age. By August, he began to rewrite history without the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned to the hockey-stick chart.

"He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band," Solomon explains. "Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world's most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period."

Through his role as a Wikipedia administrator, Connolley is said to have created or rewritten 5,428 unique Wikipedia entries.

"When Connolley didn't like the subject of a certain article, he removed it – more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand," Solomon wrote. "When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred – over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions."

Meanwhile, followers who adhered to Connolley's climate views "were rewarded with Wikipedia's blessings," Solomon contends.

Through his control of the Wikipedia pages, Connolley is said to have "turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement."

Facts about the Medieval Warm Period and criticism of global warming doctrine were purportedly scrubbed from Wikipedia's pages.

"With the release of the Climategate e-mails, the disappearing trick has been exposed," Solomon declared. "The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear."

A Wikipedia arbitration committee has stated in the past: "William M. Connolley has, on a number of occasions, misused his administrator tools by acting while involved."

A July 31, 2006, article in the New Yorker described Connolley as a "victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed."

"After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration," the report states.

"User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV [point of view] with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own," his accuser charged in a written deposition. "His views on climate science are singular and narrow."

Connolley said Wikipedia "gives no privilege to those who know what they're talking about."

Anyone care to defend that statement as a scientist doing respectable science?

Could anyone ever trust scientists of that ilk again?

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

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A good trick simply implies an elegant shortcut to manage large data sets with no loss of data integrity; or to solve previously complex equations with a simple unifying one.

That is just a ridiculous comparison. Yes a 'trick' can be something like physicists normailizing infinities, however they would not claim they were hiding something when they did it.

Like hell.

How many times do I have to prove that there has been no warming in the last ten years?

Der Speigel, by no means a conservative leaning outlet...

For all its protocol, Wikipedia’s bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was briefly a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration. “User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written deposition. “His views on climate science are singular and narrow.” A decision from the arbitration committee was three months in coming, after which Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day parole. The punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin, with two thousand pages on his watchlist—a feature that enables users to compile a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to them. He says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best page on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user who spends the most time on the site—or who yells the loudest—wins.

Connolley believes that Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about,” a view that is echoed by many academics and former contributors, including Larry Sanger, who argues that too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions. He left Wikipedia in March, 2002, after Wales ran out of money to support the site during the dot-com bust. Sanger concluded that he had become a symbol of authority in an anti-authoritarian community. “Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule,” he told me. (Sanger is now the director of collaborative projects at the online foundation Digital Universe, where he is helping to develop a Web-based encyclopedia, a hybrid between a wiki and a traditional reference work. He promises that it will have “the lowest error rate in history.”) Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that “ ‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is “infested with moonbats.” (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. “The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks,” Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn’t. There is no such test for truth.

Researcher Dr. Timothy Patterson, director of the Geoscience Center at Carleton University, shares the concern. Patterson is finding "excellent correlations" between solar fluctuations, a relationship that historically, he says doesn't exist between CO2 and past climate changes.

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In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov predicted the sun would soon peak, triggering a rapid decline in world temperatures. Only last month, the view was echoed by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. who advised the world to "stock up on fur coats." Sorokhtin, who calls man's contribution to climate change "a drop in the bucket," predicts the solar minimum to occur by the year 2040, with icy weather lasting till 2100 or beyond.

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Such research dates back to 1991, when the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study showing that world temperatures over the past several centuries correlated very closely with solar cycles. A 2004 study by the Max Planck Institute found a similar correlation, but concluded the timing was only coincidental, as the solar variance seemed too small to explain temperature changes.

However, researchers at DMI continued to work, eventually discovering what they believe to be the link. The key factor isn't changes in solar output, but rather changes in the sun's magnetosphere A stronger field shields the earth more from cosmic rays, which act as "seeds" for cloud formation. The result is less cloud cover, and a warming planet. When the field weakens, clouds increase, reflecting more light back to space, and the earth cools off.

Recently, lead researcher Henrik Svensmark was able to experimentally verify the link between cosmic rays and cloud formation, in a cloud chamber experiment called "SKY" at the Danish National Space Center. CERN plans a similar experiment this year. A few years ago, Stanford University's Hoover Institution also reported finding a correlation between the sun and climate.

Even NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies -- long the nation's most ardent champion of anthropogenic global warming -- is getting in on the act. Drew Shindell, a researcher at GISS, says there are some "interesting relationships we don't fully understand" between solar activity and climate.

BTW I quoted the scientists in whatever order I felt like. Just as the author chose to do.

What the record shows is that it was a period of intense instability. The temperature did not rise slowly, or even steadily; instead, the climate flipped several times from temperate conditions back into those of an ice age, and then back again. Around fifteen thousand years ago, Greenland abruptly warmed by sixteen degrees in fifty years or less. In one particularly traumatic episode some twelve thousand years ago, the mean temperature in Greenland shot up by fifteen degrees in a single decade.

If we go back farther still, the picture is no more comforting. Even as much of Europe and North America lay buried under glaciers, the temperature in Greenland was oscillating wildly, sometimes in spikes of ten degrees, sometimes in spikes of twenty. In an effort to convey the erratic nature of these changes, Richard Alley, a geophysicist who is leading a National Academy of Sciences panel on abrupt climate change, has compared the climate to a light switch being toyed with by an impish three-year-old. (The panel recently issued a report warning of the possibility of "large, abrupt, and unwelcome" climate changes.) He has also likened it to a freakish carnival ride. "Dozens of rapid changes litter the record of the last hundred thousand years," he observed. "If you can possibly imagine the spectacle of some really stupid person (or, better, a mannequin) bungee jumping off the side of a moving roller-coaster car, you can begin to picture the climate."

I found myself feeling torn as well. On the one hand, Event One did not sound like much to look forward to. On the other, it did seem to offer a certain perverse consolation: global warming versus Event One—either way, things were bound to end badly. I proposed this idea to Steffensen. Unimpressed, he pointed out that, if you believed the climate to be inherently unstable, the last thing you’d want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it, and he went on to explain that it would be wrong to think of global warming and Event One as alternatives. It is entirely possible, if apparently paradoxical, that global warming could produce a precipitous cooling, at least in Europe and parts of North America, by, say, shutting down the Gulf Stream. It is also possible that it could push the climate into an unstable mode, leading, especially in the upper latitudes, to a period of wild temperature swings of the sort that characterized the end of the last ice age. Finally, it is possible that we have changed the atmosphere so much—carbon-dioxide levels are approaching those of the age of the dinosaurs—that we will enter a new climate phase altogether. During the Cretaceous period, there were no major ice sheets, or ice ages, and much of the planet was covered with steamy swamps. To the extent that the historical record is any guide, the result of any climate change is unlikely to be a happy one. Steffensen recited to me an old Danish saying, whose pertinence I didn’t entirely understand, but which nevertheless stuck with me. He translated it as “Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.”

The science is clear. What is also clear is that once they get the hysteria ginned up the majority no longer cares what the actual science is.

Just keep handing out the grants to support agenda driven science.

Just keep refering back to completely discredited 'science' such as the hockeystick graph as if it hadn't been debunked.

Just keep intimidating editors from including the real science.

Make sure 'publish or perish' scientists can't find an outlet.

Just erase whatever evidence doesn't support you.

Just keep throwing in numbers from disparate sources until the kalaidascope appears to fall in line. If you look at it from just this angle...

Keep the guys who won't commit to the program away from the mike. Pick your interviewers who are in on the scam...

Climate Change Reconsidered from Diane Bast on Vimeo.

To summarize what DWetz and I am discussing for those without 17 hours a day to follow this stuff...

In 1995 the UN published this chart of global temperatures...

But then they turned a 180.

In 1999 they began pushing a chart by Mann that completely erased the 'Medieval warming period', the 'little ice age' and then he turned a neat little trick. He tacked on heat island corrupted modern 'real' data onto tree ring data that generated estimates for earlier periods before modern weather recording, to generate the appearance of a crisis.

At that point, Mann completed the coup and crudely grafted the surface temperature record of the 20th century (shown in red and itself largely the product of urban heat islands) onto the pre-1900 tree ring record. The effect was visually dramatic as the 20th century was portrayed as a climate rocketing out of control. The red line extends all the way to 1998 (Mann's `warmest year of the millennium'), a year warmed by the big El Niño of that year. It should be noted that the surface record is completely at variance with the satellite temperature record [20]. Had the latter been used to represent the last 20 years, the effect would have been to make the 20th century much less significant when compared with earlier centuries.

As a piece of science and statistics it was seriously flawed as two data series representing such different variables as temperature and tree rings simply cannot be credibly grafted together into a single series.

In every other science when such a drastic revision of previously accepted knowledge is promulgated, there is considerable debate and initial scepticism, the new theory facing a gauntlet of criticism and intense review. Only if a new idea survives that process does it become broadly accepted by the scientific peer group and the public at large.

This never happened with Mann's `Hockey Stick'. The coup was total, bloodless, and swift as Mann's paper was greeted with a chorus of uncritical approval from the greenhouse industry. Within the space of only 12 months, the theory had become entrenched as a new orthodoxy.

The ultimate consummation of the new theory came with the release of the draft of the Third Assessment Report (TAR-2000) [11] of the IPCC. Overturning its own previous view in the 1995 report, the IPCC presented the `Hockey Stick' as the new orthodoxy with hardly an apology or explanation for the abrupt U-turn since its 1995 report. They could not even offer any scientific justification for their new line.

Within months of the IPCC draft release, the long-awaited draft U.S. `National Assessment' Overview document featured the `Hockey Stick' as the first of many climatic graphs and charts in its report, affirming the crucial importance placed in it by the authors and by the industry at large. This is not an esoteric theory about the distant past, marginal to the global warming debate, but rather is a core foundation upon which a new publicity offensive on global warming is being mounted.

Two issues are raised by Mann's `Hockey Stick'.

1) Why did the climate community fail to critically review the validity of the new theory, indeed to uncritically embrace it in its entirety?

2) Is any of it true? Or is it a means of disposing of the inconvenient Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, and thus avoid the problem of the role of the sun in climate history?

Here is the real science that the Mann graph attempted to cover up.

But how likely were you to be informed of the real science? Not very...

He is now the Lead Author of the `Observed Climate Variability and Change' chapter of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR-2000), and a contributing author on several other chapters of that report. The Technical Summary of the report, echoing Mann's paper, said: "The 1990s are likely to have been the warmest decade of the millennium, and 1998 is likely to have been the warmest year."

Mann is also now on the editorial board of the `Journal of Climate' and was a guest editor for a special issue of `Climatic Change'. He is also a `referee' for the journals Nature, Science, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, JGR-Oceans, JGR-Atmospheres, Paleo oceanography, Eos, International Journal of Climatology, and NSF, NOAA, and DOE grant programs. (In the `peer review' system of science, the role of anonymous referee confers the power to reject papers that are deemed, in the opinion of the referee, not to meet scientific standards).

He was appointed as a `Scientific Adviser' to the U.S. Government (White House OSTP) on climate change issues.

Mann lists his `popular media exposure' as including - "CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, CNN headline news, BBC, NPR, PBS (NOVA/FRONTLINE), WCBS, Time, Newsweek, Life, US News & World Report, Economist, Scientific American, Science News, Science, Rolling Stone, Popular Science, USA Today, New York Times, New York Times (Science Times), Washington Post, Boston Globe, London Times, Irish Times, AP, UPI, Reuters, and numerous other television/print media" [17].

Mann's career highlights a serious problem with the modern climate sciences, namely the `star' system where high-profile scientists are promoted swiftly to influential positions in the industry. Such a star system reduces a science to the level of Hollywood.

"Global Warming Art"

I find it interesting that you totally discount the 30,000+ scientists who have put their career at risk by sticking to the truth and and the actual evidence...

...while holding on to your respect for scientists caught in the act of rigging the research, rigging the peer review process, massively evading the release of their own data for scientific review, destroying data rather than releasing it, vindictively sabotaging careers of those who do not agree with them...

Shall we pause for a brief interlude?

A reverie?

Ever-so-good!

Blind (often deliberately blind) faith in what you are spoon-fed by others - DWetz

Beck needs sponsors and the NWF probably won't apply. If you think Beck is taking that position because his sponsor pays him, run off with the good news to the DNC.

In the end, the panellists published hardly anything at all — a mere five pages of observations that explore not a single charge made by CRU’s accusers, and thus, in truth, do nothing to absolve CRU or to allay public concerns.

Lord Oxburgh of Liverpool, a man of impeccable credentials in the climate change field. Lord Oxburgh is chair of the multinational Falck Renewables, a European leader with major windfarms in the U.K., France, Spain and Italy, and he’s chair of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, a lobby group which argues that carbon capture could become a $-trillion industry by 2050.

Hide The Decline II from No Cap And Trade Coalition on Vimeo.

"Climate, not weather ya bonehead. Who'da thunk it would ever snow in winter in Minn? It's happened before, Boldwin. Global Warming predicted the Metrodome would collapse. If it got buried in snow in July I'd still believe in AGW. Nothing you say or could ever happen would falsify this theory beautifully crafted and unshakable fact about the physical universe."

The new figures confirm that 2010 will go down as one of the more remarkable years in the annals of climatology. It featured prodigious snowstorms that broke seasonal records in the United States and Europe; a record-shattering summer heat wave that scorched Russia; strong floods that drove people from their homes in places like Pakistan, Australia, California and Tennessee; a severe die-off of coral reefs; and a continuation in the global trend of a warming climate.

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It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th-century average; the last below-average year was 1976. The new figures show that 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since the beginning of 2001.

Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. “Scientists” collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs… and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it’s nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.

I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of “anti-intellectualism” that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on “Americans” is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It’s not a one-sided problem.

If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.