How Can There Be A "Climategate II" When There Was No Climagegate I?

It took some time, but Scaife's braintrust over at the Tribune-Review finally caught up to the rest of the anti-science crowd and commented on the latest batch of hacked emails from East Anglia.

For some reality-based background, we turn to the Guardian:

A fresh tranche of private emails exchanged between leading climate scientists throughout the last decade was released online on Tuesday. The unauthorised publication is an apparent attempt to repeat the impact of a similar release of emails on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009.

The initial email dump was apparently timed to disrupt the Copenhagen climate talks. It prompted three official inquiries in the UK and two in the US into the working practices of climate scientists. Although these were critical of the scientists' handling of Freedom of Information Act requests and lack of openness they did not find fault with the climate change science they had produced.

Keep that last sentence in mind.

But let's get back to what Scaife's braintrust really wants to discuss:

Among the correspondence, as reported by author James Delingpole in The Wall Street Journal, is an e-mail from Penn State global-warming guru Michael Mann: "I've been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose (Steve) McIntyre and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests."

That would be the Canadian ex-mining engineer who exposed Mr. Mann's flawed "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures. Rather than "prove" Mr. McIntyre wrong, Mann preferred to go dirt-digging.

Here's the WSJ article the braintrust references.  And this is what he wrote about Professor Mann:

Consider an email written by Mr. Mann in August 2007. "I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests. Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy." Doug Keenan is a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. Steve McIntyre is the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose flaws in Mr. Mann's "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures.

One can understand Mr. Mann's irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC's 2001 Third Assessment Report, and it brought him near-legendary status in his community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place.

The sensible way to do so is to prove Mr. McIntyre wrong using facts and evidence and improved data. Instead the email reveals Mr. Mann casting about for a way to smear him. If the case for man-made global warming is really as strong as the so-called consensus claims it is, why do the climategate emails show scientists attempting to stamp out dissenting points of view? Why must they manipulate data, such as Mr. Jones's infamous effort (revealed in the first batch of climategate emails) to "hide the decline," deliberately concealing an inconvenient divergence, post-1960, between real-world, observed temperature data and scientists' preferred proxies derived from analyzing tree rings?

The part left out by Delinpole (and subsequently by the braintrust) is that Mcintyre had, by 2007 was already being challenged. Like this from 2005:

Ammann and Eugene Wahl of Alfred University have analyzed the Mann-Bradley-Hughes (MBH) climate field reconstruction and reproduced the MBH results using their own computer code. They found the MBH method is robust even when numerous modifications are employed. Their results appear in two new research papers submitted for review to the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Climatic Change. The authors invite researchers and others to use the code for their own evaluation of the method.

Ammann and Wahl’s findings contradict an assertion by McIntyre and McKitrick that 15th century global temperatures rival those of the late 20th century and therefore make the hockey stick-shaped graph inaccurate. They also dispute McIntyre and McKitrick’s alleged identification of a fundamental flaw that would significantly bias the MBH climate reconstruction toward a hockey stick shape. Ammann and Wahl conclude that the highly publicized criticisms of the MBH graph are unfounded. They first presented their detailed analyses at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco last December and at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Denver this year.

The main thrust of the brainstrust's argument is that the "hockey stick" is wrong and therefore climate science is wrong.

But it isn't and the science is still undeniable.

Funny how the braintrust never seems to get around to that NOAA report.