Warm Enough?
Garrison Hilliard
By KEITH JOHNSON
The picture that emerges of prominent climate-change scientists from the
more than 3,000 documents and emails accessed by hackers and put on the
Internet this week is one of professional backbiting and questionable
scientific practices. It could undermine the idea that the science of
man-made global warming is entirely settled just weeks before a crucial
climate-change summit.
Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East
Anglia, England, were victims of a cyberattack by hackers sometime
Thursday. A collection of emails dating back to the mid-1990s as well as
scientific documents were splashed across the Internet. University
officials confirmed the hacker attack, but couldn't immediately confirm
the authenticity of all the documents posted on the Internet.
The publicly posted material includes years of correspondence among
leading climate researchers, most of whom participate in the preparation
of climate-change reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, the authoritative summaries of global climate science that
influence policy makers around the world.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
The release of the documents comes just weeks before a big climate-change
summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, meant to lay the groundwork for a new
global treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate
change. Momentum for an agreement has been undermined by the economic
slump, which has put environmental issues on the back burner in most
countries, and by a 10-year cooling trend in global temperatures that runs
contrary to many of the dire predictions in climate models such as the
IPCC's.
A partial review of the emails shows that in many cases, climate
scientists revealed that their own research wasn't always conclusive. In
others, they discussed ways to paper over differences among themselves in
order to present a "unified" view on climate change. On at least one
occasion, climate scientists were asked to "beef up" conclusions about
climate change and extreme weather events because environmental officials
in one country were planning a "big public splash."
The release of the documents has given ammunition to many skeptics of
man-made global warming, who for years have argued that the scientific
"consensus" was less robust than the official IPCC summaries indicated and
that climate researchers systematically ostracized other scientists who
presented findings that differed from orthodox views.
Since the hacking, many Web sites catering to climate skeptics have pored
over the material and concluded that it shows a concerted effort to
distort climate science. Other Web sites catering to climate scientists
have dismissed those claims.
The tension between those two camps is apparent in the emails. More recent
messages showed climate scientists were increasingly concerned about blog
postings and articles on leading skeptical Web sites. Much of the internal
discussion over scientific papers centered on how to pre-empt attacks from
prominent skeptics, for example.
Fellow scientists who disagreed with orthodox views on climate change were
variously referred to as "prats" and "utter prats." In other exchanges,
one climate researcher said he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap out
of" a prominent, skeptical U.S. climate scientist.
In several of the emails, climate researchers discussed how to arrange for
favorable reviewers for papers they planned to publish in scientific
journals. At the same time, climate researchers at times appeared to
pressure scientific journals not to publish research by other scientists
whose findings they disagreed with.
One email from 1999, titled "CENSORED!!!!!" showed one U.S.-based
scientist uncomfortable with such tactics. "As for thinking that it is
'Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us' as
though we are the gatekeepers of all that is acceptable in the world of
paleoclimatology seems amazingly arrogant. Science moves forward whether
we agree with individual articles or not," the email said.
More recent exchanges centered on requests by independent climate
researchers for access to data used by British scientists for some of
their papers. The hacked folder is labeled "FOIA," a reference to the
Freedom of Information Act requests made by other scientists for access to
raw data used to reach conclusions about global temperatures.
Many of the email exchanges discussed ways to decline such requests for
information, on the grounds that the data was confidential or was
intellectual property. In other email exchanges related to the FOIA
requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all
emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others,
they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make
their data public.
Write to Keith Johnson at keith....@wsj.com
Bill Steele
> Warm Enough?
>
> From: Garrison Hilliard <ske...@lists.opn.org>
>
>
>By KEITH JOHNSON
>
>The picture that emerges of prominent climate-change scientists from the
>more than 3,000 documents and emails accessed by hackers and put on the
>Internet this week is one of professional backbiting and questionable
>scientific practices. It could undermine the idea that the science of
>man-made global warming is entirely settled just weeks before a crucial
>climate-change summit.
>
>Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East
>Anglia, England, were victims of a cyberattack by hackers sometime
>Thursday. A collection of emails dating back to the mid-1990s as well as
>scientific documents were splashed across the Internet. University
>officials confirmed the hacker attack, but couldn't immediately confirm
>the authenticity of all the documents posted on the Internet.
>
>The publicly posted material includes years of correspondence among
>leading climate researchers, most of whom participate in the preparation
>of climate-change reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
>Change, the authoritative summaries of global climate science that
>influence policy makers around the world.
>
AP IMPACT: Science not faked, but not pretty
(AP) - Dec 12, 2009
LONDON - 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, according to an
exhaustive review by The Associated Press.
The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored
private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the
world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges
don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming
because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The scientists were keenly aware of how their work would be viewed
and used, and, just like politicians, went to great pains to shape
their message. Sometimes, they sounded more like schoolyard taunts
than scientific tenets.
The scientists were so convinced by their own science and so driven
by a cause "that unless you're with them, you're against them," said
Mark Frankel, director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law
at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also
reviewed the communications.
Frankel saw "no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data,
although concerns could be raised about some instances of very
'generous interpretations.'"
Some e-mails expressed doubts about the quality of individual
temperature records or why models and data didn't quite match. Part
of this is the normal give-and-take of research, but skeptics
challenged how reliable certain data was.
The e-mails were stolen from the computer network server of the
climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in southeast
England, an influential source of climate science, and were posted
online last month. The university shut down the server and contacted
the police.
The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters
reading and rereading them - about 1 million words in total.
One of the most disturbing elements suggests an effort to avoid
sharing scientific data with critics skeptical of global warming. It
is not clear if any data was destroyed; two U.S. researchers denied
it.
The e-mails show that several mainstream scientists repeatedly
suggested keeping their research materials away from opponents who
sought it under American and British public records law. It raises a
science ethics question because free access to data is important so
others can repeat experiments as part of the scientific method. The
University of East Anglia is investigating the blocking of
information requests.
"I believe none of us should submit to these 'requests,'" declared
the university's Keith Briffa. The center's chief, Phil Jones, wrote:
"Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will
be hiding behind them."
When one skeptic kept filing FOI requests, Jones, who didn't return
AP requests for comment, told another scientist, Michael Mann: "You
can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but
this is the person who is putting FOI requests for all e-mails Keith
(Briffa) and Tim (Osborn) have written."
Mann, a researcher at Penn State University, told The Associated
Press: "I didn't delete any e-mails as Phil asked me to. I don't
believe anybody else did."
The e-mails also show how professional attacks turned very personal.
When former London financial trader Douglas J. Keenan combed through
the data used in a 1990 research paper Jones had co-authored, Keenan
claimed to have found evidence of fakery by Jones' co-author. Keenan
threatened to have the FBI arrest University at Albany scientist
Wei-Chyung Wang for fraud. (A university investigation later cleared
him of any wrongdoing.)
"I do now wish I'd never sent them the data after their FOIA
request!" Jones wrote in June 2007.
In another case after initially balking on releasing data to a
skeptic because it was already public, Lawrence Livermore National
Lab scientist Ben Santer wrote that he then opted to release
everything the skeptic wanted - and more. Santer said in a telephone
interview that he and others are inundated by frivolous requests from
skeptics that are designed to "tie-up government-funded scientists."
The e-mails also showed a stunning disdain for global warming skeptics.
One scientist practically celebrates the news of the death of one
critic, saying, "In an odd way this is cheering news!" Another
bemoans that the only way to deal with skeptics is "continuing to
publish quality work in quality journals (or calling in a Mafia
hit.)" And a third scientist said the next time he sees a certain
skeptic at a scientific meeting, "I'll be tempted to beat the crap
out of him. Very tempted."
And they compared contrarians to communist-baiting Sen. Joseph
McCarthy and Somali pirates. They also called them out-and-out frauds.
Santer, who received death threats after his work on climate change
in 1996, said Thursday: "I'm not surprised that things are said in
the heat of the moment between professional colleagues. These things
are taken out of context."
When the journal, Climate Research, published a skeptical study, Penn
State scientist Mann discussed retribution this way: "Perhaps we
should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to
no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."
That skeptical study turned out to be partly funded by the American
Petroleum Institute.
The most provocative e-mails are usually about one aspect of climate
science: research from a decade ago that studied how warm or cold it
was centuries ago through analysis of tree rings, ice cores and
glacial melt. And most of those e-mails, which stretch from 1996 to
last month, are from about a handful of scientists in dozens of
e-mails.
Still, such research has been a key element in measuring climate
change over long periods.
As part of the AP review, summaries of the e-mails that raised issues
from the potential manipulation of data to intensely personal attacks
were sent to seven experts in research ethics, climate science and
science policy.
"This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though
still within bounds," said Dan Sarewitz, a science policy professor
at Arizona State University. "We talk about science as this pure
ideal and the scientific method as if it is something out of a
cookbook, but research is a social and human activity full of all the
failings of society and humans, and this reality gets totally
magnified by the high political stakes here."
In the past three weeks since the e-mails were posted, longtime
opponents of mainstream climate science have repeatedly quoted
excerpts of about a dozen e-mails. Republican congressmen and former
vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have called for either
independent investigations, a delay in U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency regulation of greenhouse gases or outright boycotts of the
Copenhagen international climate talks. They cited a "culture of
corruption" that the e-mails appeared to show.
That is not what the AP found. There were signs of trying to present
the data as convincingly as possible.
One e-mail that skeptics have been citing often since the messages
were posted online is from Jones. He says: "I've just completed
Mike's (Mann) 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."
Jones was referring to tree ring data that indicated temperatures
after the 1950s weren't as warm as scientists had determined.
The "trick" that Jones said he was borrowing from Mann was to add the
real temperatures, not what the tree rings showed. And the decline he
talked of hiding was not in real temperatures, but in the tree ring
data which was misleading, Mann explained.
Sometimes the data didn't line up as perfectly as scientists wanted.
David Rind told colleagues about inconsistent figures in the work for
a giant international report: "As this continuing exchange has
clarified, what's in Chapter 6 is inconsistent with what is in
Chapter 2 (and Chapter 9 is caught in the middle!). Worse yet, we've
managed to make global warming go away! (Maybe it really is that
easy...:)."
But in the end, global warming didn't go away, according to the vast
body of research over the years.
None of the e-mails flagged by the AP and sent to three climate
scientists viewed as moderates in the field changed their view that
global warming is man-made and a threat. Nor did it alter their
support of the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, which some of the scientists helped write.
"My overall interpretation of the scientific basis for (man-made)
global warming is unaltered by the contents of these e-mails," said
Gabriel Vecchi, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
scientist.
Gerald North, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, headed a
National Academy of Sciences study that looked at - and upheld as
valid - Mann's earlier studies that found the 1990s were the hottest
years in centuries.
"In my opinion the meaning is much more innocent than might be
perceived by others taken out of context. Much of this is overblown,"
North said.
Mann contends he always has been upfront about uncertainties,
pointing to the title of his 1999 study: "Northern Hemisphere
Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties
and Limitations."
Several scientists found themselves tailoring their figures or
retooling their arguments to answer online arguments - even as they
claimed not to care what was being posted to the Internet
"I don't read the blogs that regularly," Jonathan Overpeck of the
University of Arizona wrote in 2005. "But I guess the skeptics are
making hay of their (sic) being a global warm (sic) event around
1450AD."
One person singled out for criticism in the e-mails is Steve
McIntyre, who maintains Climate Audit. The blog focuses on
statistical issues with scientists' attempts to recreate the climate
in ancient times.
"We find that the authors are overreaching in the conclusions that
they're trying to draw from the data that they have," McIntyre said
in a telephone interview.
McIntyre, 62, of Toronto, was trained in math and economics and says
he is "substantially retired" from the mineral exploration industry,
which produces greenhouse gases.
Some e-mails said McIntyre's attempts to get original data from
scientists are frivolous and meant more for harassment than doing
good science. There are allegations that he would distort and misuse
data given to him.
McIntyre disagreed with how he is portrayed. "Everything that I've
done in this, I've done in good faith," he said.
He also said he has avoided editorializing on the leaked e-mails.
"Anything I say," he said, "is liable to be piling on."
The skeptics started the name-calling said Mann, who called McIntyre
a "bozo," a "fraud" and a "moron" in various e-mails.
"We're human," Mann said. "We've been under attack unfairly by these
people who have been attempting to dismiss us as frauds as liars."
The AP is mentioned several times in the e-mails, usually in
reference to a published story. One scientist says his remarks were
reported with "a bit of journalistic license" and "I would have
rephrased or re-expressed some of what was written if I had seen it
before it was released." The archive also includes a request from an
AP reporter, one of the writers of this story, for reaction to a
study, a standard step for journalists seeking quotes for their
stories.
--
Bill Steele
ws...@cornell.edu
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