Hacked e-mail shows climate fraud; NY Times downplays
Richard Moore
[cid:AC4F3B9E-1CF4-44AA-847F-26CD22D7D544@home]<http://www.nytimes.com/>
November 21, 2009 Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute
By ANDREW C.
REVKIN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/andrew_c_
revkin/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Hundreds of private e-mail messages<http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/>
and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university
are causing a stir among global
warming<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index
.html?inline=nyt-classifier> skeptics, who say they show that climate
scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence
on climate change.
The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British
climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and
whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat
the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments in some cases
derisive about specific people known for their skeptical views.
Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate
skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of
which dates back 13 years.
In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical
trick in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In
another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as idiots.
Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an
effort to withhold scientific information. This is not a smoking
gun; this is a mushroom cloud, said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist
who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and
is criticized in the documents.
Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under
siege by the skeptics camp and worried that any stray comment or
data glitch could be turned against them.
The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global
warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely
to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly
raise questions about the quality of research on some specific
questions and the actions of some scientists.
In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at
the National Center for Atmospheric
Research<http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/research/climate/>, and other
scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in
temperature. Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular:
The fact is that we cant account for the lack of warming at the
moment and it is a travesty that we cant, Dr. Trenberth wrote.
The cache of e-mail messages also includes references to journalists,
including this reporter, and queries from journalists related to
articles they were reporting.
Officials at the University of East
Anglia<http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/> confirmed in a statement
on Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and
that the police had been brought in to investigate the breach. They
added, however, that they could not confirm that all the material
circulating on the Internet was authentic.
But several scientists and others contacted by The New York Times
confirmed that they were the authors or recipients of specific
e-mail messages included in the file. The revelations are bound to
inflame the public debate as hundreds of negotiators prepare to
negotiate an international climate accord at meetings in Copenhagen
next month, and at least one scientist speculated that the timing
was not coincidental.
Dr. Trenberth said Friday that he was appalled at the release of
the e-mail messages.
But he added that he thought the revelations might backfire against
climate skeptics. He said that he thought that the messages showed
the integrity of scientists. Still, some of the comments might lend
themselves to being interpreted as sinister.
In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns
over the last two millenniums, Phil Jones, a longtime climate
researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had
used a trick employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to hide
the decline in temperatures.
Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State
University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/
p/pennsylvania_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, confirmed
in an interview that the e-mail message was real. He said the choice
of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often
used the word trick to refer to a good way to solve a problem, and
not something secret.
At issue were sets of data, both employed in two studies. One data
set showed long-term temperature effects on tree rings; the other,
thermometer readings for the past 100 years.
Through the last century, tree rings and thermometers show a
consistent rise in temperature until 1960, when some tree rings,
for unknown reasons, no longer show that rise, while the thermometers
continue to do so until the present.
Dr. Mann explained that the reliability of the tree-ring data was
called into question, so they were no longer used to track temperature
fluctuations. But he said dropping the use of the tree rings was
never something that was hidden, and had been in the scientific
literature for more than a decade. It sounds incriminating, but
when you look at what youre talking about, theres nothing there,
Dr. Mann said.
In addition, other independent but indirect measurements of temperature
fluctuations in the studies broadly agreed with the thermometer
data showing rising temperatures.
Dr. Jones, writing in an e-mail message, declined to be interviewed.
Stephen McIntyre, a blogger who on his Web site,
climateaudit.org<http://climateaudit.org/>, has for years been
challenging
data<http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/climate-auditor-challenged-
to-do-climate-science/> used to chart climate patterns, and who
came in for heated criticism in some e-mail messages, called the
revelations quite breathtaking.
But several scientists whose names appear in the e-mail messages
said they merely revealed that scientists were human, and did nothing
to undercut the body of research on global warming. Science doesnt
work because were all nice, said Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist
at
NASA<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/nati
onal_aeronautics_and_space_administration/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
whose e-mail exchanges with colleagues over a variety of climate
studies were in the cache. Newton may have been an ass, but the
theory of gravity still works.
He said the breach at the University of East Anglia was discovered
after hackers who had gained access to the correspondence sought
Tuesday to hack into a different server
supportingrealclimate.org<http://realclimate.org/>, a blog unrelated
to NASA that he runs with several other scientists pressing the
case that global warming is true.
The intruders sought to create a mock blog post there and to upload
the full batch of files from Britain. That effort was thwarted, Dr.
Schmidt said, and scientists immediately notified colleagues at the
University of East Anglias Climatic Research Unit. The first posts
that revealed details from the files appeared Thursday at The Air
Vent<http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/leaked-foia-files-62-mb-of-g
old/>, a Web site devoted to skeptics arguments.
At first, said Dr. Michaels, the climatologist who has faulted some
of the science of the global warming consensus, his instinct was
to ignore the correspondence as just the way scientists talk.
But on Friday, he said that after reading more deeply, he felt that
some exchanges reflected an effort to block the release of data for
independent review.
He said some messages mused about discrediting him by challenging
the veracity of his doctoral dissertation at the University of
Wisconsin<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u
/university_of_wisconsin/index.html?inline=nyt-org> by claiming he
knew his research was wrong. This shows these are people willing
to bend rules and go after other peoples reputations in very serious
ways, he said.
Spencer R. Weart, a physicist and historian who is charting the
course of research on global warming, said the hacked material would
serve as great material for historians.
Copyright 2009<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>
The New York Times Company<http://www.nytco.com/>
___________________________ subscribe mailto:
newslog+...@googlegroups.com<mailto:newslog+...@googlegroups.com>
websites:
http://www.governourselves.org/ http://escapingthematrix.org/
http://thecreditbankdevelopmentmodel.blogspot.com/ http://cyberjournal.org
archives:
http://groups.google.com/group/newslog/topics
http://groups.google.com/group/cyberjournal/topics
Moderator: r...@quaylargo.com<mailto:r...@quaylargo.com> (comments
welcome)
[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type image/gif which had a
name of nytlogo153x23.gif]