Climategate - Monckton takes a victory lap

From Pajamas Media:

Climategate: Viscount Monckton Takes a Victory Lap
For several months, the �Monthly CO2 Reports,� compiled by me at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org, have been pointing out that there has been no statistically significant �global warming� for 15 years. Regular attacks on my calculations and graphs have appeared on blogs by the usual suspects � Gavin Schmidt of NASA being, as usual, the most venomously ad hominem and the least scientifically plausible.

Then came Climategate. Kevin Trenberth, one of the many scientists whose activities I had been following with suspicion for some years, had privately been saying to his colleagues that there had been �no global warming for a decade� and that it was �a travesty� that they could not explain why. Publicly, of course, the Climategate conspirators had been saying that the last ten years were the warmest decade on the instrumental record � true, but not surprising given that there has been 300 years of global warming.

Now, Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia has admitted publicly, and � as far as I know � for the first time, that there has been no statistically significant �global warming� for 15 years. He has also admitted that his Climatic Research Unit has lost much of the data behind the �hockey-stick� graph, via which Michael Mann and other Climategate conspirators had falsely attempted to demonstrate that the Medieval Warm Period was not warmer than the present.

Jones has admitted that he is not very good at keeping data tidily. And that, in a scientist, is a startling omission. Seekers after truth in the natural world, from Leonardo da Vinci to Isaac Newton, were famous for keeping notebooks. There they carefully recorded all of their observations. Newton, who went to the same grammar school as Margaret Thatcher (one of the few grammar schools not to have been abolished by politicians intent on destroying the last vestiges of sound education in Britain), had been taught to keep these notebooks from an early age.

Yet Phil Jones had not managed the most basic task of anyone compiling a temperature record. He had not kept, in good order, the data on which the record was based. Anyone who reads the �Harry Read-Me.txt� file � which contains 15,000 lines of commentary by a programmer about the numerous appalling defects in data handling and processing at the Climate Research Unit � cannot help but be struck by the sheer ineptitude of the whole proceeding.

In effect, the temperature record of the CRU is little better than a fabrication � much like the four assessment reports of the IPCC. Taxpayers should clamor for the abolition of the CRU and of the IPCC. Their findings are not just lies � they are expensive lies.

Expensive lies indeed -- re: Al Gore's and Rajendra Pachuri's billions. Not bad for a failed Minister and a Railroad Engineer with a PHD in Economics.