The blogosphere is alive this morning with the news that many more emails regarding the inner workings of the IPCC and associated anthropogenic global warming proponents have been released by a still unknown agent.

See blog articles at Air Vent, and Watts up with that for samples.

Following are some examples of email excerpts posted on the Air Vent site.  Keep in mind that these excerpts are without context. These excerpts purport to show that a small group is trying to manipulate the data and the public perception:

4443> Jones:

Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low  level clouds.

<1939> Thorne/MetO:

 Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical  troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a  wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the  uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these  further if necessary [...]

 <3066> Thorne:

 I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it  which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

Presumably this one refers to Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph:

2884> Wigley:

 Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of  dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]

1611> Carter:

 It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much  talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by  a select core group.

0714> Jones:

 Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about  the tornadoes group.

 1790> Lorenzoni:

 I agree with the importance of extreme events as foci for public and  governmental opinion [...] ‘climate change’ needs to be present in people’s  daily lives. They should be reminded that it is a continuously occurring and  evolving phenomenon

1485> Mann:

 the important thing is to make sure they’re losing the PR battle. That’s what  the site [Real Climate] is about.

2428> Ashton/co2.org:

 Having established scale and urgency, the political challenge is then to turn  this from an argument about the cost of cutting emissions – bad politics – to  one about the value of a stable climate – much better politics. [...] the most  valuable thing to do is to tell the story about abrupt change as vividly as  possible

1577> Jones:

[FOI, temperature data]

Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we  get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US  Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.

The British newspaper, The Guardian, has more on the story.  Initially there had been a question about the authenticity of the purported emails, but the Guardian story quotes Michael Mann as saying they look genuine.

This new release of additional emails comes just a week before the big United Nations climate change conference in Durban, South Africa.

Searchable database of Climategate 2 emails: http://foia2011.org/

See my post on the original Climategate of two years ago here.

An eight-part series of articles from the German online newspaper, Spiegel Online, examines the state of climate science and how it has been affected by the “climategate” scandals. This is a fairly balanced report (in English) and should make a good weekend read. Each article is one page long.

It begins: “Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations, climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are the predictions about global warming and its consequences? And would it really be the end of the world if temperatures rose by more than the much-quoted limit of two degrees Celsius?”

Read the series starting here:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686697,00.html

In an interview with the BBC, Phil Jones, the head of the British Climatic Research Unit at the heart of ClimateGate, told the BBC: the recent warming trend that began in 1975 is not statistically different from two other planetary warming phases since 1850; there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and; it is possible the Medieval Warm Period was indeed a global phenomenon thereby making the temperatures seen in the latter part of the 20th century by no means unprecedented. Jones also explained why he manipulated the data to “hide the decline.”

The BBC interview: http://tinyurl.com/yb9h7vd

Chris Horner, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, filed a freedom of information request to NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), in August 2007. Finally on Dec. 31, 2009 NASA complied with the request and released emails and other documents.

According to Horner, “The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.”

Horner article part 1 here: http://tinyurl.com/ylkkq76

NASA emails here: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/business/foia/GISS.html