Geoff Jenkins - The G. Gordon Liddy of Climate Gate

Watergate was a political scandal that had many twists and turns. Ultimately, the event forced the resignation of Richard Nixon and led to several indictments of White House officials known as the Plumbers, with G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt at its head. The recent events surrounding emails and documents being leaked by some whistle blower at the East Anglia Hadley Climate Research Unit, which incidentally is hot on the heals of the Copenhagen Conference, clearly show that Climate gate is not unlike the Watergate scandal with Geoff Jenkins at the center.

Who is Geoff Jenkins? In 2004, the UK Guardian described him as "the man Tony Blair turns to for the facts about climate change." But, to really know who he is, because he is not one of the top names in the history of the anthropogenic global warming movement, we need to go back to 1988.

Geoff Jenkins started his climate prediction business when the IPCC was created in 1988, with Sir John Houghton leading it; Jenkins' job was to put data together from science to create the Group One Report in the 90's for the IPCC. In May of 1990, Jenkins was among the first people to staff the newly created Hadley Center and after the Rio de Janiero Earth Summit in 1992, Hadley moved into the policy area and researched ways to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, which ultimately led to the Kyoto Agreement in 1997. Three years later, Hadley's mission statement changed again due to flooding in the UK when the UK's environmental department set up a Climate Impacts Program to cope with adaptation.

And Geoff Jenkins was at the center of all of this.

Now that we have revisited the brief history of Hadley and Geoff Jenkins, let's move on to the leaked emails and documents and we will revisit him later to tie it together.

Sometime during the third week of November, a whistle blower at East Anglia's Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU) uploaded emails and documents in a 61 megabyte compressed file to a message board. A message was attached to the post that said something to the effect that the climate was too important to keep the material secret and the file would be up for a short period of time.

The file went viral and spread around the Internet so fast, the USS Enterprise would look like a Model-T in a race. Climate Audit was shut down because it couldn't handle the bandwidth usage and a mirror site was created to handle the enormous traffic. Torrent sites had it and other obscure websites uploaded the file.

Then people began to scour through the emails and had a look at Oz behind the curtain:

- Michael Mann talks about ruining a peer review journal (1047388489).

- Tim Osborn discusses how to alter data to stop a cooling trend (939154709).

- Phil Jones asks his colleagues to delete FOIA requests (1212063122).

- Email showing that Greenpeace is involved in drafting a letter to The Times (872202064).

You can read the rest at the Doug Ross Journal.

At any rate, what these leaked emails reveal is a history of academic fraud that has led many governments to enact laws that have, or will be, costly; Spain is realizing this already. Keith Briffa's fraudulent tree ring report, which Michael Mann relied heavily on to create an equally bogus graph, known as the Hockey Stick Chart was cited numerous times in the IPCC's reports. What they failed to include was the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, which would have shown a completely different conclusion.

Michael Mann is a contributor at Real Climate's blog. In October of 2005, Scientific American called Real Climate, "A refreshing antidote to the political and economic slants that commonly color and distort news coverage of topics like the greenhouse effect, air quality, natural disasters and global warming."

Getting back to Geoff Jenkins, slowly.

The significance of Real Climate is that it's hosted by Environmental Media Services. Activist Cash describes EMS:

If you’ve ever been advised to steer clear of a food, beverage, or other consumer product based on the claims of a nonprofit organization, you’ve likely been “spun” by Fenton’s multi-million-dollar message machine -- and Environmental Media Services (EMS) has probably been the messenger.

EMS is the communications arm of leftist public relations firm Fenton Communications. Based in Washington, in the same office suite as Fenton, EMS claims to be “providing journalists with the most current information on environmental issues.” A more accurate assessment might be that it spoon-feeds the news media sensationalized stories, based on questionable science, and featuring activist “experts,” all designed to promote and enrich David Fenton’s paying clients, and build credibility for the nonprofit ones. It’s a clever racket, and EMS & Fenton have been running it since 1994.

Arlie Schardt founded EMS (now called Science Communication Network) in 1994. Twenty years before that, he was a writer for Sports Illustrated and left the magazine to lead the Environmental Defense Fund. Interestingly, he was also in charge of the Tides Center when it was led by non other than Wade Rathke of the now discredited ACORN.

Now we get to Geoff Jenkins.

In the mid 90's, a report was issued using faked data that still didn't show any warming effect between 1995-96. In an attempt to explain it away, he made a suggestion that there was a NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation, aka La Nina) reversal.

On March 18, 1996, Michael Fumento caught the scandalous suggestion and wrote an article in the Washington Times:

Global-warming enthusiasts desperately grasp at anything to prove their case. In early January, the Climatic Research Unit at England's University of East Anglia made headlines, including the New York Times, with a preliminary report saying 1995 was the hottest year on record. But their data were for only 11 months. Rather than risk December's temperatures spoiling everything, they jumped the gun and sent out their press releases.

Their fears were fulfilled when December's average temperature came in at the lowest in 17 years. "It was a pretty ordinary year," said NASA scientist John Christy, who has been analyzing satellite data on temperature since 1979. And James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who pretty much started the whole global-warming scare, admits his study of land areas – where the effects of global warming would be most severe – revealed that 1995 was about 0.02 degrees celsius cooler than 1990.

In a 1996 email to Phil Jones, Geoff Jenkins writes:

Remember all the fun we had last year over 1995 global temperatures,
with early release of information (via Oz), "inventing" the December
monthly value, letters to Nature etc etc?

I think we should have a cunning plan about what to do this year,
simply to avoid a lot of wasted time.

I have been discussing with David P and suggest the following:

1. By 20 Dec we will have land and sea data up to Nov

2. David (?) computes the December land anomaly based on 500hPa
heights up to 20 Dec.

3. We assume that Dec SST anomaly is the same as Nov

4. We can therefore give a good estimate of 1996 global temps by 20
Dec

5. We feed this selectively to Nick Nuttall (who has had this in the
past and seems now to expect special treatment) so that he can write
an article for the silly season. We could also give this to Neville
Nicholls??

6. We explain that data is provisional and how the data has been
created so early (ie the estimate for Dec) and also

7. We explain why the globe is 0.23k (or whatever the final figure is)
cooler than 95 (NAO reversal, slight La Nina). Also that global annual
avg is only accuirate to a few hundredths of a degree (we said this
last year - can we be more exact, eg PS/MS 0.05K or is this to big??)

8. FROM NOW ON WE ANSWER NO MORE ENQUIRIES ABOUT 1996 GLOBAL TEMPS BUT
EXPLAIN THAT IT WILL BE RELEASED IN JANUARY.

9. We relesae the final estimate on 20 Jan, with a joint UEA/MetO
press release. It may not evoke any interest by then.

10. For questions after the release to Nuttall, (I late Dec, early
Jan) we give the same answer as we gave him.

Are you happy with this, or can you suggest something better (ie
simpler)? I know it sound a bit cloak-and-dagger but its just meant to
save time in the long run.

Im copying this to DEP and CKF also for comments.

Cheers

Geoff

Jenkins' "cunning plan" was to spoon feed selected information to Nick Nuttal, who is the head spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program, for his articles. The "via Oz?" comment in regards to this "cunning plan", is most likely referring to Senior Research Scientist at Australia's Climate Forecasting Group, Neville Nichols.

By selecting which media sources to spoon feed selected information to, Jenkins would have caused a frenzy. After the real temperature data was issued, "We relesae (sic) the final estimate on 20 Jan, with a joint UEA/MetO press release. It may not evoke any interest by then."

The fringe, state run, lamestream media can spin this topic however they want. However, much like an event caught on video, nobody can deny the blatant fraud that was occurring all these years. We "climate change deniers" knew that these hucksters were "cooking the books" all along and the emails should not be the central issue, but the code that was created to alter the data is, the emails merely reinforce the fraud that was going on behind closed doors.