Energy Probe

The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a year-long study to be unveiled at the Copenhagen climate change meetings that begin today, was designed to dramatize how little time we have left to save the planet from catastrophic climate.

But the Copenhagen Diagnosis, which is billed as an update to the last report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has a credibility problem. The Climategate gang — the same crew now discredited by emails that emerged showing a conspiracy to cook the books — had a dozen of its members in charge of producing the Copenhagen Diagnosis. More credibility problems: The Copenhagen Diagnosis relies on data from the Hadley Centre of the UK meteorological office and the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University — two bodies that may now need to set aside the data altogether and start over.

The suspect data — known as HADCRUT — is a merged dataset comprised of marine temperatures provided by the Hadley Centre and land-based temperatures from the Climate Research Unit. Because the CRU portion of the data is so suspect with so much of the public, the Met Office has announced a three-year year investigation in which it will re-examine 160 years of temperature data. The Met took this step, which makes official the view that the world has been relying on suspect data, over the objections of the UK government, which fears waiting until 2012 before having solid data. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is among the most vocal of global warming advocates, having said that Copenhagen is the last chance to save the world from environmental disaster and characterizing those who disagree as “behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics.”

The IPCC, has also announced an investigation into the Climategate scandal, as has East Anglia University and Penn State University, home to another infamous member of Climategate: Michael Mann.

Mann is the author of the hockey stick, the icon of the global warming adherents which purported to show that the Earth warmed rapidly in the 20th century. That graph was later found to be bogus, as hearings into it before the U.S. Congress determined. Yet now Mann is back – he is one of the authors of the Copenhagen Diagnosis — and so is his hockey-stick graph!

All told, 12 of the 26 Copenhagen Diagnosis authors are implicated in the Climategate scandal, including Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, a much criticized Lead Author of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

The prognosis for the Copenhagen Diagnosis is grim.

Read the Copenhagen Diagnosis.

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, December 07, 2010