Dirty tricks in The Trick

The coming climate alarmist jamboree, COP26, is about to open its doors in Glasgow.

There is a tradition in the weeks leading up to each COP of orchestrating a crescendo of alarmist stories in the media – probably in the hope that the racket will drown out the damp squib of the conference itself. The dim royals have already been doing their bit.

The latest clash of the cymbals was broadcast by – who else? – the BBC, yesterday evening. It is a dramatisation of the events surrounding the publication in 2009 of a very comprehensive collection of documents and emails acquired from one of the main centres of climate alarmism, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), an event which was quickly termed 'Climategate'.

To any rational person, the contents of these emails were a shocking exposure of the machinations of a cabal of alarmist scientists in numerous institutions around the world to force through the alarmist message and denigrate and deplatform their critics in major scientific journals.

For those with eyes to see yet who had misguidedly imagined that science was a search for empirical knowledge pursued by independent-minded, dispassionate seekers after truth, the Climategate emails contained one rude awakening after another.

The alarmist response to this shocking scandal was to make much of the fact that these emails had been 'stolen'. To which we might respond that, had anyone outside the cabal known about these exchanges, they would have had to have been released in the hail of Freedom of Information requests. They are all public property, whether written with the intention of publication or not. Remember this: the veracity of the contents of this email collection has never been denied.

The corollary argument from the alarmists was that these emails had been nefariously 'hacked' from the UEA's server and thus in order to avoid complicity in this crime, we ought to unsee them – the writers and recipients were, after all, just colleagues thinking aloud amongst themselves.

In fact, all the forensic evidence shows that the email collection was not 'hacked' from the server by some international, climate-denying man of mystery working for Big Oil, but copied onto a storage medium and leaked by some noble whistleblower, probably a lowly insider who had developed a conscience at what was going on in the alarmist cabal.

Two 'official' inquiries exonerated the poor lambs at CRU and UAE of everything (or, more accurately, nothing) and the issue was kicked into the long grass. The mainstream media outlets ignore the Climategate emails, though their contents are scandalous, probably because journalists and their readers easily suffocate in detail. After the initial uproar the widespread outrage never materialised and the story fizzled out for everyone except the core climate change sceptics – taunted as climate 'deniers' by alarmists.

One of those who has definitely not forgotten about the Climategate emails is Stephen McIntyre. He was mentioned frequently in these email dispatches from the alarmist front and the measures taken to ignore him, shut him up and generally discredit him were now on open view. Yes, they really were out to get him, this dissenting voice who so effectively rebutted so much of their alarmist work, particularly that of the paleoclimate fraternity.

The most outstanding of his early achievements was the destruction of the iconic 'hockey stick' graph of Michael Mann, which managed to magic away all previous warming episodes, hence the level 'shaft' of the stick, and the alarming rise in modern times, the 'blade'.

The Climategate emails, which McIntyre must have read with outraged fascination, also drew attention to something that the Director of the CRU, Phil Jones, termed 'Mike's Nature trick', a.k.a 'hide the decline'.

The decline that needed to be hidden comes in Mann's spaghetti graph of paleo temperature reconstructions: in modern times the temperature as measured by thermometers goes up, whereas the temperature calculated from the tree-ring proxy goes down. They can't both be right. What to do? Mann simply snipped the end off the tree-ring curve, thus hiding the unwanted decline, and hid the snipped end behind the spaghetti of the other results, which was the 'trick' used in the publication of the curve by Phil Jones in 1998 in the journal Science – and repeated by numerous others ever since.

Any unbiased observer with any integrity left should deplore Mann's trickery, but should deplore even more the appalling fact that the Director of the CRU, one of the leading lights of the climate change cabal, should not only know about it but refer to it with approval and even use it in his own publications.

McIntyre's dogged work debunking the mangled science of alarmist papers on his website Climate Audit was painstakingly precise and quite irrefutable. The alarmist response was not even to attempt to refute his work, but to smother it, ignore it, smear him and deny him access to their data and methods. This David and Goliath battle between McIntyre and the alarmist scientific establishment has rumbled on ever since but, just as with the Climategate emails, the rumbles have always been beneath the detail-shy and science-shy notice of the mainstream media.

You would have thought that the alarmist community would really rather prefer to keep the Climategate scandal in this state of inattention, but, seemingly desperate to do their bit for COP26, they have turned the events around Climategate into a 'thriller' titled The Trick.

Not a cheap thriller, either: the hero of the tale, Phil Jones, is played by Jason Watkins; Edward Acton, the leader of one of the enquiries, by Adrian Edmondson – both well-known names who command big fees. The thriller was scheduled for the prime-time evening slot on its main channel, BBC One.

The BBC's description of the programme on its website will probably surprise anyone who remembers the Climategate scandal as it unfolded:

Conspiracy thriller based on the events of the 'Climategate' scandal in 2009. Professor Phil Jones and his team of climatologists at the University of East Anglia find that their work has been hacked by climate change deniers and turned into the first big fake-news story. The deniers and corporations with vested interests skilfully create the image of climate change as a conspiracy being perpetrated by academic scientists.

Although an inquiry concludes that there was no case for Jones and his team to answer, it has taken a decade for the public perception of the veracity of climate change to recover.

Your author is in the happy position of not having a television set and, not residing in the UK, is not able to watch the travesty for its full one and a half hours on iPlayer.

There can be no doubt that the 'thriller' has been flogged to broadcasters around the world and will have been dubbed or subtitled appropriately. Your cynical author would also suspect that helpful money from Big Green has changed hands as part of this distribution.

The BBC is so confident of the gullibility of its audience that we even get that old discredited visual meme of 'chimneys' belching out black 'smoke' a.k.a backlit steam:

The grumpy climate sceptic scans this guff wearily: 'conspiracy', 'hacked', 'climate change deniers', 'fake-news story', 'corporations with vested interests', 'conspiracy', 'no case for Jones and his team to answer', 'veracity of climate change'. It seems that in the climate change caper, the Devil has all the best tunes.

Nevertheless, the dogged Stephen McIntyre ploughs on undeflected, promising a detailed analysis of the BBC's Trick. Even his relatively superficial first glance at the thriller has revealed many blatant manipulations the BBC has carried out in their misrepresentation of the contents of his website (even in readers' comments) in order to embellish the conspiracy narrative. The BBC has even gone so far as to create a mock-up of the Climate Audit website and fill it with manipulated content. A lot of work for someone in the production team. Why go to all that trouble, we wonder, when they could have used the real website with hardly any effort at all? Fake-news, anyone?

Unfortunately, as with McIntyre's detailed exposure of Mann's 'trick', we can say now that the misdeeds of the BBC will not get beyond the few open minds who still care about such things as integrity and 'veracity', nor will the detail-averse mainstream media bother to explain it to their consumers. The exposé of the Mann-Jones trick by the journalist David Rose in an article in the Mail on Sunday in 2009, an article based on McIntyre's work, surfaced for a day or two and then sank into oblivion. The Devil has not only the best tunes but the biggest drums and the loudest trumpets.

Update 26.10.2021

The warmist rag New Scientist reviewed The Trick with predictable results:

The title refers to Jones’s reference in an email to a colleague about a research method or “trick”, which was taken out of context to argue that Jones was manipulating the data.

Another dispassionate seeker of truth bites the dust.