Climategate: The Stolen Emails
In mid-November 2009, the Internet went ballistic with the news of alleged proof that global warming really is a hoax. Deniers based the claim on e-mails among climate scientists stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). Most of the attention has focused on a dozen or so of the e-mails. If there is evidence of wrong-doing, it is in these e-mails that it is likely to reside. All the e-mails can be read in a searchable database here.
The most often-cited e-mail may be this one from Phil Jones, director of the CRU: “I've just completed Mike's [Mann of hockey stick fame] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (from 1981 onward) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." The use of the word “trick” led Sarah Palin to claim in an op-ed in the Washington Post that “leading climate ‘experts’…manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures.” But that is not what Jones’s e-mail shows. Mann’s “trick” was to use actual temperature measurements, rather than temperatures inferred from tree-rings, for temperatures since the 1960s. Thus the “decline” was not in global temperatures, but in erroneous tree-ring data. Mann’s “trick” substituted better data for obviously incorrect data, making the result more reliable, not less. Think of “trick” as in “trick of the trade.” In fact, one can throw out all the tree-ring data and the hockey stick remains intact.
Palin and other deniers claim that the e-mails show that scientists “tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.” This claim arises from an e-mail from Mann complaining about one published article and saying, “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” The journal in question was Climate Research and the article claimed “that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” The American Petroleum Institute funded the study. Three of the journal’s editors, including the incoming editor in chief, resigned in protest over the publication of the article. Mann was suggesting that his colleagues not publish in a journal with such low standards as Climate Research had demonstrated; whether any followed his advice we do not know. This falls far short of attempting to silence critics.
Another charge was that the e-mails show that data files and some e-mails had been deleted. But Trevor Davies, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Research at the University of East Anglia, reports that no files or e-mails were deleted or “otherwise dealt with in any fashion with the intent of preventing the disclosure.”
In another e-mail, Jones wrote to Mann: “The other paper by MM is just garbage….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!" Jones should not have written that and may have violated scientific ethics. That said, Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, says that the two papers "were actually discussed in detail in chapter six of the Working Group I report. Furthermore, articles from the journal Climate Research, which was also decried in the emails, have been cited 47 times in the Working Group I report.” See here.
Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research wrote in an e-mail, “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.” That led James Delingpole of the UK Telegraph to write that Trenberth “[c]onceal[ed] private doubts about whether the world is really heating up." But as the complete e-mail showed, Trenberth was referring to an article he wrote in which he described global warming as “unequivocal.” The “travesty” to him is that scientists do not have better measuring systems and better understanding.
The Associated Press had five of its staff members read each of the 1,073 stolen e-mails, about 1 million words in total. The AP summed up: “E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data—but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked.”
The stolen e-mails do not reveal a single faked data point, a single deleted e-mail, or a single article prevented from publication. Nor do they show the slightest evidence of a conspiracy to perpetrate a hoax. They show that scientists are human and possibly that some behaved unethically; if so, to no effect. The e-mails do not change a single one of the multiple lines of evidence that show that the world is warming and that humans are the cause.