CalgaryLiberal

Wikileaks has the University of East Anglia (UEA) emails on uploaded and readily available to be downloaded.

The Climate Research Unit (CRU) at UEA have sent out numerous press releases on the subject of these emails.

There is currently an editing war on wikipedia and, well, the discussion encapsulates all the special interests in the -gate. It’s a good read if you have the time.

Climategate is essentially the following: An assortment of emails were stolen by an anonymous hacker and then placed into the public arena for debate. These several thousand emails have supposedly shown a type of malfeasance against the notion of climate change and the rigour of science behind the environmentalist movement. At least this is the dual charge from several political sources. The specific troubling quotes are as follows:

1. Phil Jones of East Anglia Univeristy to a lot of people. [Nov 16, 1999]

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature 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.”

2. Phil Jones to Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University [July 8, 2004]

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

3. Michael Mann to Phil Jones + Gabi Hegerl of University of Edinburgh [Aug 10, 2004]

“Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future.”

4. Kevin Trenberth of US National Center for Atmospheric Research to Michael Mann. [Oct 12, 2009]

“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…”

At a glance these quotations look rather bad. Fairly bad, in fact. Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, even states that “My colleagues and I 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.”

Hm. Although they “do not read well” the context of the entire -gate puts the issue to rest rather quickly.

First of all, no one would base policies that’d reshape how the world worked based on a few studies by a few scientists. There are rigorous institutions put into place to counter bad science. In addition to this, thousands of studies published that have been talking about climate and how it’s a threat to mankind (note, however, that I don’t say climate change is a threat to the planet–George Carlin explains why [NSFW, swearing]). So even if these specific scientists are wrong, even if the multitude of institutions were wrong, and there has been a massive conspiracy (Ha!), the movement to solve climate change is not imperilled. At most this release of emails may quash the careers of three or four scientists.

Heck, as per the CRU press release on December 1st “Over 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning land surface temperatures has been accessible to climate researchers, sceptics and the public for several years…” The press release continues to say

“It is well known within the scientific community and particularly those who are sceptical of climate change that over 95% of the raw station data has been accessible through the Global Historical Climatology Network for several years.  We are quite clearly not hiding information which seems to be the speculation on some blogs and by some media commentators,” commented the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research Enterprise and Engagement Professor Trevor Davies.

It’s been checked, double checked, and triple checked again, again, and again. No information is being hidden.

Numerous scientists and other groups have waded into the -gate to say that climate change is a fact.

American Meteorological Society:

For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.

There’s an entire wikipedia page dedicated to the -gate and a section on how it has been received by scholars. All of the reactions by scientists thus far are in defence of the fact of climate change being a fact.

Proclamations of ‘victory’ by Hannity+Inhofe and others are, quite frankly, quite off the mark.

Secondly, on a more intriguing note, the emails that were released show a pretty neat look into the private lives of numerous scientists. A few quotes quickly come to mind:

… need to get this surgery over and then I will get busy with my review…

…getting married, did I mention, will work on this next data set a soon as I am back from my honeymoon…

At no point a direct reference in the leaked emails say anything of directly cooking the books. There are no mentions of meetings that were specifically made to skirt the law or scientific principles.If they felt comfortable enough to say the word ‘trick’ wouldn’t it be at odds with a conspiratorial outlook to not talk about meetings about cooking entire articles, papers, and all that? It just isn’t there.

If anything, there might be a worry that too many academics are working overtime and not getting to see their newborn grandkids enough.

Thirdly, the CRU press release on November 24th explains how the quotes were taken out of context. The ‘trick’ was just a word used to describe a statistical technique to make the data clearer in that it solved the discrepancy between the flip from non-specific measurements of temperature (cores of trees, steam ships measuring temperature of sea water before use of water) to precise measurement instruments (a thermometer being the most basic example). The press release is in the quote below.

Recently thousands of files and emails illegally obtained from a research server at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have been posted on various sites on the web. The emails relate to messages received or sent by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) over the period 1996-2009.

A selection of these emails have been taken out of context and misinterpreted as evidence that CRU has manipulated climate data to present an unrealistic picture of global warming.

This conclusion is entirely unfounded and the evidence from CRU research is entirely consistent with independent evidence assembled by various research groups around the world.

There is excellent agreement on the course of temperature change since 1881 between the data set that we contribute to (HadCRUT3) and two other, independent analyses of worldwide temperature measurements. There are no statistically significant differences between the warming trends in the three series since the start of the 20th century. The three independent global temperature data series have been assembled by:

• CRU and the Met Office Hadley Centre (HadCRUT3) in the UK.
• The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Asheville, NC, USA.
• The Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), part of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) in New York.

The warming shown by the HadCRUT3 series between the averages of the two periods (1850-99 and 2001-2005) was 0.76±0.19°C, and this is corroborated by the other two data sets.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 4th Assessment Report (AR4) published in 2007 concluded that the warming of the climate system was unequivocal. This conclusion was based not only on the observational temperature record, although this is the key piece of evidence, but on multiple strands of evidence. These factors include: long-term retreat of glaciers in most alpine regions of the world; reductions in the area of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) snow cover during the spring season; reductions in the length of the freeze season in many NH rivers and lakes; reduction in Arctic sea-ice extent in all seasons, but especially in the summer; increases in global average sea level since the 19th century; increases in the heat content of the ocean and warming of temperatures in the lower part of the atmosphere since the late 1950s.

CRU has also been involved in reconstructions of temperature (primarily for the Northern Hemisphere) from proxy data (non-instrumental sources such as tree rings, ice cores, corals and documentary records). Similar temperature reconstructions have been developed by numerous other groups around the world. The level of uncertainty in this indirect evidence for temperature change is much greater than for the picture of temperature change shown by the instrumental data. But different reconstructions of temperature change over a longer period, produced by different researchers using different methods, show essentially the same picture of highly unusual warmth across the NH during the 20th century. The principal conclusion from these studies (summarized in IPCC AR4) is that the second half of the 20th century was very likely (90% probable) warmer than any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely (66% probable) the warmest in the past 1300 years.

One particular, illegally obtained, email relates to the preparation of a figure for the WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999. This email referred to a “trick” of adding recent instrumental data to the end of temperature reconstructions that were based on proxy data. The requirement for the WMO Statement was for up-to-date evidence showing how temperatures may have changed over the last 1000 years. To produce temperature series that were completely up-to-date (i.e. through to 1999) it was necessary to combine the temperature reconstructions with the instrumental record, because the temperature reconstructions from proxy data ended many years earlier whereas the instrumental record is updated every month. The use of the word “trick” was not intended to imply any deception.

Phil Jones comments further: “One of the three temperature reconstructions was based entirely on a particular set of tree-ring data that shows a strong correlation with temperature from the 19th century through to the mid-20th century, but does not show a realistic trend of temperature after 1960. This is well known and is called the ‘decline’ or ‘divergence’. The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline, including the article that is listed in the legend of the WMO Statement figure. It is because of this trend in these tree-ring data that we know does not represent temperature change that I only show this series up to 1960 in the WMO Statement.”

The ‘decline’ in this set of tree-ring data should not be taken to mean that there is any problem with the instrumental temperature data. As for the tree-ring decline, various manifestations of this phenomenon have been discussed by numerous authors, and its implications are clearly signposted in Chapter 6 of the IPCC AR4 report.

Included here is a copy of the figure used in the WMO statement, together with an alternative version where the climate reconstructions and the instrumental temperatures are shown separately.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

The WMO1999 figure (top) with climate reconstructions and instrumental temperatures merged, and a version (bottom) with the climate reconstructions (coloured) and instrumental temperatures (annual & summer in black) shown separately.

The worry about “idiots” is just from worrying about misrepresentations of themselves in the political discourse around climate change. That’s a fairly hairy place to put anyone who is locked up day in and day out in a lab, and that has never had any training with the media. Stressful, even. Not everyone is a silver tongued politician nor a solid communicator like Al Gore or David Suzuki. People are imperfect and, well, it’s a good thing these scientists knew this and reminded each other of it throughout their emails since, well, a movement can only handle so many media gaffes.

So, in conclusion, the reaction by the right-wing bloggers on this issue is completely unwarranted. Same with the coverage by Fox News, et al. Climate change is still a reality to be handled at Copenhagen and beyond.

9 Responses to “Climategate?”