Global warming skeptics around the world are applauding the release of leaked computer files in a bombshell that is being called the greatest scandal in modern science.
The hundreds of private emails sent to and from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain show what some claim is a systematic attempt to fudge the facts by top climate change scientists.
CRU is a leader in the field of climate change research whose findings are used by such bodies as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says global warming is a threat to humanity.
Leaked online by either a whistleblower or an outside hacker just weeks before the Copenhagen climate summit which began on Monday, claims have been made that the emails and other documents show scientists manipulated the data in order to validate their stance that global warming is caused by human activity.
In what has been dubbed Climategate, the email exchanges suggest that CRU director Phil Jones and others may have tampered with their own temperature data, suppressed contrary data, planned to block files under Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, withheld data, and conspired to corrupt what is supposed to be an independent peer review process regarding the publication of CRU scientific papers.
“A lot of it wasn’t a surprise to me because I already knew how these folks worked,” says Ross McKitrick, an associate professor of economics at the University of Guelph who specializes in environmental economics and climate change issues.
“It’s a very defensive, combative group of people who don’t engage with their critics in a constructive way. There’s clear evidence in the emails of them manipulating the IPCC process—keeping evidence out of it that they disagreed with,” says McKitrick, who was a member of the Expert Review Process for the IPCC’s Working Group 1.
‘Hide the decline’
In one email, CRU’s Jones writes about keeping two skeptics’ papers from the IPCC: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
In another—one that has caused much speculation—Jones writes of using Michael Mann’s “nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series” to “hide the decline” in temperatures since 1960. Mann is a professor of meteorology at Penn State University and a prominent manmade global warming advocate.
Mann told the Washington Post last week that the “trick” Jones referred to involved placing a chart of proxy temperature records, which ended in 1980, next to a line showing the temperature record collected by instruments from that time onward. “It’s hardly anything you would call a trick,” Mann said, adding that both charts were differentiated and clearly marked.
An email on Oct. 10, 2009 from Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, bemoans the lack of warming.
“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.”
On Oct. 27, Mann writes: “Perhaps we'll do a simple update to the Yamal post... As we all know, this isn’t about truth at all, it’s about plausibly deniable accusations. In another email he tells Jones that “it would be nice to try to contain the putative MWP”—the Medieval Warm Period.
The emails also discuss threatening to quit sending articles to an academic journal that published dissenting views until they get rid of a certain “troublesome editor” (achieved) and how to deal with the introduction of FOI law in the U.K.
Allegations that data was “cherry-picked” and FOI requests blocked have been vigorously denied.
Furore
The release of the information has caused a furore and already heads have started to roll. Jones, 57, stepped down last week while an independent review is being carried out, and Penn State University said in a statement that it is investigating Mann.
IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri told BBC Radio 4’s The Report that the issue is serious and he wants it investigated. “We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,” he said.
Jones said in a statement that he and his colleagues “accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.”
However, he pointed out that the CRU’s global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent groups of scientists. “The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them,” he said.
Leading global warming advocates are downplaying the significance of the leaked files including University of British Columbia professor William Rees, originator of the “ecological footprint” concept.
“There’s nothing in the email leaks that changes anything about the climate science,” Rees says.
He points out that editors at the prestigious science journal Nature—which has published many of CRU’s papers—have thoroughly investigated the leaked documents and have found “absolutely nothing that would indicate to them that there’s been any major fraudulent cover-up or anything of that nature.”
In a column in this newspaper last week, David Suzuki said the emails “do nothing to diminish the decades of overwhelming evidence that the Earth is not only warming largely because of emissions from burning fossil fuels but that it’s worse than we thought.”
Al Gore said in an interview with CNN Wednesday that the emails are being taken out of context by the “noise machine of the climate deniers” who have blown them out of proportion.
Public trust broken
However, climate change skeptics say the scandal casts doubt on the argument that greenhouse gases cause global warming. Two scientists, one British and one Canadian, are reportedly intending to pursue the CRU for criminal fraud.
“This is not just a smoking gun—it’s an atomic bomb,” says climatologist and long-time skeptic Tim Ball.
Ball says that although those who are unfamiliar with climate science and “the history of how this has all evolved” may think the emails are innocuous, the “criminality” is obvious.
“Even if you don’t understand the science, criminality is very clear. So if somebody is talking about deliberately deleting files, or deliberately tricking up the files, or making sure they silence editors, or making sure they control who does the peer review—these sorts of things anybody can spot as criminality.”
Ball says what emerged in the emails—which include “all the same names that dominate and control the IPCC”—represent just the tip of the iceberg in what is wrong with climate change science and the computer modelling used by the scientists at CRU.
The silence of mainstream media in reporting the leak widely, especially in North America, has been deafening, he adds. “Of course, many of them had established extremely biased positions, and now they’ve got to retract from those and back down from those.”
McKitrick, who is currently teaching in Britain, says the issue has been well-reported in the U.K. and there’s a “really strong sense over here that public trust has been broken, that people have been misled, and it’s not going to be ‘business and usual’ for trying to move forward with costly climate policy.”
Miscalculations
Two names that crop up repeatedly in the emails are those of McKitrick and Canadian Steve McIntyre, referred to as “the two Ms.” McIntyre, who is also called a “bozo” and a “moron” in the emails, is editor of Climate Audit, a website devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data.
McKitrick and McIntyre have discovered evidence of miscalculations in some of the key scientific studies behind the IPCC reports. Their work debunked Michael Mann’s now infamous “hockey stick” graph depicting how Earth’s temperatures had remained relatively steady over the past thousand years, then appeared to suddenly skyrocket in the 20th century. They also showed that Mann’s calculations omitted a significant warm period in the middle ages.
Their findings led to an investigation by the National Academy of Sciences and a Congressional review of climate science, and Mann was required to publish a retraction. Mann’s graph, the poster child of the global warming movement, was referred to repeatedly by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth” to prove the existence of human-caused global warming.
Meanwhile, with world leaders meeting in Copenhagen to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto accord, Rees predicts the fallout from the leaked documents will have an “enormous” negative impact on negotiations at the climate summit.
At the opening of COP 15 on Monday, Saudi Arabia’s chief climate negotiator, Mohammed al-Sabban, speaking from the floor said that the leaked emails had shaken people’s trust in scientists.
Al-Sabban said that an independent inquiry was needed—aside from the one to be conducted by the IPCC—“especially now that we are about to conclude an agreement that ... is going to mean sacrifices for our economies.”
“In light of recent information ... this scientific scandal has assumed huge proportion,” he said. “We think it is definitely going to affect the nature of what can be trusted in the negotiations.”
