Letters From A Tory Daily views on British politics and the Conservative Party from a centre-right thinker who writes letters on his blog to politicians, journalists and many others.

“If you looked through any organisation’s emails from the last 10 years you’d find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world’s leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke.”

…or so says a spokesman for Greenpeace, who are fighting back in the furious row over hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world’s leading climate scientists during the past 13 years that have been stolen by hackers and leaked online.  The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on climate change and lead by Professor Phil Jones.  Climate change sceptics allege the emails provide “smoking gun” evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by mankind. In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] 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.”  Some of the other incriminating email remarks, listed in full at Bishop Hill’s blog, include:

Michael Mann (creator of the infamous and now discredited ‘hockey stick’ graph showing global temperature rises in recent years) discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.

Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results.

Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news”.

Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.

Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.

Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.

Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.

Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too.

Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’.

Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.

Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.

Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.

Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at the Real Climate blog.

Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.

Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.

Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.

Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit website findings.

Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather and has threatened to resign.

Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. [Note - Saiers was subsequently ousted]

Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.

Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct.

Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4]

Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.

Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.

Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner.

Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.

Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.

Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.

Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible.

Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.

Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.

Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.

David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.

Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it.

Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.

If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the climate change ’sceptics’ salivating in unison.  Even as a relatively undecided blogger when it comes to climate change theory, I can see that this is big - really really really big.