Fox News Watchdog

George Will falsely claimed that “one of the emails” reportedly stolen from the U.K.’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) said that a climate scientist “wished he could delete, get rid of, the medieval warming period [MWP].” In fact, the scientist wrote in the email that he wanted to ” ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ ” and has stated that the email “reflected his desire to identify exactly when the Medieval Warm Period began”; moreover, Will falsely claimed that in another CRU email, a scientist wrote, “[I]t is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that global warming has stopped.”

Will falsely
claimed that climate scientist wrote that he “wished he could delete, get rid
of” medieval warm period

From the November 29 edition of ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (host):
George, there has been a partisanizing of this issue, and then you throw in one
more complication we’ve had over the last week. This Climate Research Institute
of — at East Anglia University, someone hacked into their email account and
showed a bunch of emails between scientists, which opponents of climate change
legislation said proves that they are rigging the science and trying to hide
information that runs counter to their theories.

WILL: Well, it raises the question
of — we’re being asked to wager trillions of dollars and substantially
curtailed freedom on climate models that are imperfect and unproven. And the
consensus, far from being as solid as they say it is, and the debate as over as
they say it is, the emails indicate people are very nervous about suppressing
criticism, gaming the peer-review process for scholarly works, and all the rest.

One of the emails said it is a
travesty — his word — it is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that
global warming has stopped. Well, they shouldn’t be embarrassed about that. It’s
a complicated business, and that’s why we shouldn’t wager these
trillions.

PAUL KRUGMAN
(New York Times columnist):
That’s not — it’s, you know, part — all those emails — people have never seen
what academic discussion looks like. They don’t — there’s not a single smoking
gun in there. There’s nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not
able to explain why the fact that 1998 was a very warm year doesn’t actually
mean that global warming has stopped.

I mean,
that’s loose wording, right? I mean, everything is about this — we’re really in
the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then
people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there is no trend
here. And that’s what — the travesty is how hard it has been to explain why
that bad reasoning –

WILL: One of
the emails, Paul, said he wished he could delete, get rid of, the medieval
warming period. That lasted 600 years.

In fact, climate
scientist wrote in email that he wanted to “contain” MWP. Michael E. Mann, a meteorology
professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State
University, wrote in the June 4, 2003, email:

Phil and I have recently submitted a
paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which
are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K,
rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/
regard to the memo, that it would be nice to
try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a
hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back. [emphasis added]

Mann reportedly
said he wanted to identify when MWP began, not “delete, get rid of” it.
According to a November 26 Morning Call (PA) article,
Mann explained that his email regarding MWP “reflected his desire to identify
exactly when the Medieval Warm Period began.” From the article:

Mann also said his 2003 e-mail
saying ”it would nice to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP”’ was not a call for
scientists to deny the Earth warmed naturally 1,000 years ago. He said it
reflected his desire to identify exactly when the Medieval Warm Period began.

Will falsely claimed scientist wrote “it is
a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that global warming has
stopped”

Will: “One of the
emails said … it is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that global
warming has stopped.” From the November
29 edition of
This Week:

WILL: One of the emails said it is a
travesty — his word — it is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that
global warming has stopped. Well, they shouldn’t be embarrassed about that. It’s
a complicated business, and that’s why we shouldn’t wager these trillions.

In
fact, email referred to “lack of warming at the moment,” not “the fact that
global warming has stopped.”
National
Center for Atmospheric
Research climatologist Kevin Trenberth wrote in an October 12, 2009, email:

Hi
all

Well I have my own
article on where
the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have
broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches
of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it
smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and
also a record low, well below the previous record
low.

This is January
weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then
played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E.,
2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy.
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can
be obtained from the author.)

The
fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09
supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are
surely wrong. Our observing system is
inadequate.[emphasis added]

Trenberth email
cited “my own article
on where
the heck is global warming?” which addressed
the “incomplete explanation” of
short-term climate variations
and
maintained that “global warming is continuing.”
In the email, Trenberth was
referring to a
journal article in which, as Wired’s Threat Level blog
reported,
he discussed how
“global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would
seem to suggest otherwise.” Indeed, his article covered what Trenberth described as an “incomplete
explanation” of short-term climate variations, while maintaining “that global
warming is unequivocally happening.”

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