Embarrassing Documents Stolen From Climate Researchers

The climate science community has been buzzing after a hacker stole 62 MB of documents from University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). CRU is one of the leading research bodies on natural and human-induced climate change and played a key role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, considered to be the most authoritative report of its kind. A zip file, whose authenticity is still in question, containing over a thousand e-mails, raw data, and other documents has been posted all over the internet and is proving to be quite embarrassing to CRU. The ethics of such a hacking notwithstanding, it shows that even scientists are not immune from political skulduggery (yup, skulduggery – look it up) and personal rancor.

Having skimmed through a chunk of the documents, most of it lacks context and can’t be understood. Most of the more relevant parts have received much emphasis by a multitude of journalists and other web sites.

Amongst the revelations we find that at least one scientist wanted to “beat the crap out of” another, skeptical, scientist. There’s encouragement to go around skeptical publications by either not reviewing them in the “peer-review” process, or not citing papers published by warming skeptics in other climate science papers, thereby denying them too much credibility. Once a skeptical scientist became an editor of a science journal, climate scientists were encouraged to boycott that journal. There’s also discussion of keeping skeptics out of the IPCC report.

There’s discussion of deleting emails, allegedly in an attempt to prevent certain data and methodological points, and the personal doubts about man-made warming that result from those data points, from being made public.

It seems that some scientists are making accommodations for political agendas saying:

“It was good to see you again yesterday – if briefly. One particular thing you said – and we agreed – was about the IPCC reports and the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation agenda driven by organizations like the WTO. So my first question is do you have anything written or published, or know of anything particularly on this subject, which talks about this in more detail?”

We find a few examples of doubts about the validity of scientific conclusions such as:

“In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and forcing assumptions/uncertainties.”
*MAGICC = Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse gas Induced Climate Change*

or

(in wondering why the ocean temperatures haven’t risen in a predicted way, relative to land temperatures – and data showing a short cooling period from the 1940’s)

“If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean – but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips”…”It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”. Let me go further. If you look at NH vs SH and the aerosol effect (qualitatively or with MAGICC) then with a reduced ocean blip we get continuous warming in the SH, and a cooling in the NH—just as one would expect with mainly NH aerosols.”

Several examples of observed data not matching computer models for climate change, like this one:

“In recent decades winter sea level pressure has decreased over the Arctic and increased in the Northern Hemisphere subtropics, with an associated strengthening of midlatitude westerly winds. This trend has previously been shown to be inconsistent with simulated internal climate variability”… ”we compare observed Northern Hemisphere sea level pressure trends with those simulated in response to all the major climate forcings in eight state-of-the-art coupled climate models over the past 50 years, and find that the observed trend is inconsistent both with simulated internal variability and with the simulated response to combined human and natural climate influences.”

And finally, an email that SEEMS to display deliberate efforts to match data with the “hockey-stick” graphs so that any inconsistencies are minimized.

“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.”
*no real deceit here – “trick” simply refers to tree rings that showed different temperatures, but by adding extra information from other temperature records the inconsistency was resolved – still shady though*

These documents are proving to be quite the Rorschach test. If you’re a skeptic, this is proof that anthropogenic climate change is a myth. If you advocate human-induced warming, it’s just a peek into how scientists actually interact and that the community is not monolithic; it shows a lack of conspiracy and no evidence of the falsifying of data. Clearly scientists are not immune from having their human passions influence their assertions.

For my part, I think it doesn’t do much to prove warming is a “myth”. It does show that many scientists and policy decision makers don’t trust the public to make their own decisions and that the “scientific process” has been somewhat compromised. It’s evidence that much thoughtfulness is needed in our attempts to deal with climate change. Caution is needed, especially as the Copenhagen Conference nears. We wouldn’t want to consent to a treaty that might effectively tie one arm behind our back as we combat environmental and economic calamity.

To be sure, this will give fresh ammunition to skeptics of global warming. But I think that the tension between skeptics and advocates should be a good thing (though it’s typically disrespectful and exagerated) that could give rise to some creative solutions. By appreciating both sides of the debate, we might be able to come up with practical ways of become more environmentally and economically sustainable.