The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has revealed plans to make a dramatic film about the 2009 ClimateGate e-mail scandal involving scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Titled The Trick — a reference to one of the infamous e-mails uncovered in the scandal — the drama would appear to be portraying the scientists as victims of a cyberattack rather than the charlatans that some of the e-mails showed them to be.
The BBC clearly foretold the drama’s intentions, writing, “Professor Jones became the victim of cyber terrorism with stolen emails used by human-induced climate change deniers to promote their view of global warming ahead of an international conference.”
Jason Watkins, a British actor who has appeared in the Netflix series The Crown, is set to play Phil Jones, the climate researcher who was the head of the CRU at the time. Watkins also seemed to put to rest any notion that the drama would be a fair and balanced look at the scandal, instead signaling that it would simply be a fawning look at the aggrieved scientist Phil Jones.
“It is a privilege to play the brilliant scientist, Phil Jones, whose own private world was so threatened from outside and whose research and efforts have been so vital globally in combating the effects of climate change,” Watkins said.
To the BBC, it’s clear: Jones and his fellow scientists were the victims of whomever it was that published e-mails between he and his colleagues.
But what was ClimateGate really?
In November of 2009, the world of climate science was rocked by the release of thousands of e-mails between scientists who were investigating so-called climate change. Those e-mails showed some of the duplicitous tactics that certain leading scientists stooped to in order to further the science of anthropogenic global warming.
While the scientists of the CRU in East Anglia insist the e-mails were “hacked” and stolen, the true source of the e-mails has never been made known. But some of those e-mails were truly damning of the scientists’ methods as well as their integrity.
For instance, the most famous of the e-mails released, and the source of the drama’s title, was from Jones to colleagues Raymond Bradley, Michael Mann, and Malcom Hughes and described using “Mike’s Nature trick”:
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcom,
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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Cheers
Phil
What exactly was “Mike’s Nature trick?”
Real Climate Science’s Tony Heller explained: “Tree ring data showed that temperatures declined after 1940 and that didn’t suit their agenda. So, the climate scientists simply hid it.”
Mann, another climate fraudster, recreated temperature going back a thousand years using tree-ring data. In doing this, he basically erased the Medieval Warm Period — a period of warmer than normal temperatures that lasted from approximately 950 A.D. to 1250 A.D. Climate realists often point to the Medieval Warm Period as evidence that climate variance is a natural and cyclical phenomenon rather than man-made.
At the very end of his recreation in the latter half of the 20th century, Mann substituted real temperatures that were much warmer than the tree-ring data showed. These actions led to the infamous “hockey stick graph,” which featured so prominently in Al Gore’s “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth.
Another e-mail to Mann described the suppression of scientific papers that Jones didn’t like and that he thought shouldn’t be included in an IPCC report.
Mike,
…I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!
Cheers
Phil
So, Jones wrote to Mann about censoring climate-science papers they didn’t like, even going so far as to suggest that he might “redefine what peer review literature is.” What were those papers, and what were their conclusions? We’ll never know because Jones decided unilaterally that they weren’t important or relevant.
The BBC is welcome to create whatever fictional drama about ClimateGate they wish. But who was really aggrieved here? The scientists who were unmasked by the release of their e-mails, or the science itself?
