SansPretense

Thoughts on the hacked global warming emails…

Posted by davonwf
November 20, 2009

For any of you keeping up on today’s major blog story, I thought I would make some comments from the perspective of a scientist on the controversy.

Science relies on open debate. When I first saw the story, my instinct was to give the scientists the benefit of the doubt: many discussions within a scientific research group, if taken out of context and without a thorough understanding of the mathematical and scientific issues involved, could sound to a lay person as “scientific misconduct” especially when people read into them what they want to. However, the more I read these emails, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The public is surely blowing some out of context, but with so many of the emails pointing to the same forms of scientific misconduct, there seems to be a very worrisome pattern. If these emails truly are evidence of what they seem to be, it hurts the scientific community as a whole by degrading public trust. I keep waiting for someone to put them in perspective from the point of view of CRU, but they seem to be more suspiciously silent than I would expect…

If you haven’t been following the news, basically one of the leading climate change research institutions, the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, or CRU, had their email servers hacked. The anonymous hackers posted a large file containing emails and some scientific data that they took from the server. CRU has confirmed the hacking and that the emails appear to be genuine. There are many news sites and bloggers covering the story, with the previous link being to the Herald Sun, and Australian newspaper. Ace of Spades HQ picked up the story (twice, lol), which is where I learned about it.

Let’s put this story into some context, and I’ll be as neutral as I can. First of all, contrary to what the news media may have led you to believe, the scientific discussion for or against global warming is not a cut-and-dry, black-or-white one. Even within the community of scientists that believe in anthropogenic (man-made) global warming climate change (AGW), there is a debate over the details. There are questions over how sensitive the climate is to additional CO2, whether or not some (if not all) of the warming can be attributed to solar activity, and there is many discussions over just how to analyze – and interpret - the data. The details of all of this is for a different post. The important thng to note is this: different ways of analyzing the data can lead to drastically different interpretations nad results, especially when dealing with a politically heated topic as this. Steve McIntyre, one of the major players in this story/debate - isn’t a climatologist. However, he has been researching this topic for quite some time, and his arguments have been quite compelling. He runs the site Climate Audit (which is suffering from major server overload since this story broke), and has been attacking the “Hockey Stick” graph for quite some time, along with the methodology of the authors of the graph, Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes. The emails that were hacked are correspondence between Mann and other authors at CRU.

Because Climate Audit is running so slowly right now, I suggest reading the story at Watts Up With That (WUWT), who mirried Climate Audit’s post. WUWT has a good selection of damning emails here.

Here are a couple of selections (below the fold):

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

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) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich

Taken by itself, I wouldn’t say that this was evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. As a scientist, we are always processing our data in ways that we believe justifiable in order to demonstrate what we believe the trend to actually be. However, manipulating your data in order to cover up unwanted results and support a hypothesis that the data doesn’t support is evidence of scientific misconduct. Throwing out a data point because you believe the instrument malfunctioned or you have dirt on a sensor is one thing, but changes to “hide a decline” seems to be pushing it. The question I have is whether Jones was being careless in how he phrased his data processing, or if this is part of a larger pattern.

Other emails seem to point to the later:

From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

In the above email, “CA” is referring to the previously mentioned website Climate Audit. Now, McIntyre have been trying to get his hands on the raw, unprocessed data from Mann, et al in order to try to reproduce their analysis. This is actually part of the scientific process – scientific data is supposed to be open to peer review. Mann, et al, have been resisting calls to release their data – even claiming it was lost. There was even a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed (and here), and emails would’ve been subject to such a request…

A couple of months ago, by the way, McIntyre, with the help of some scientific journal editors, did manage to get the raw data. I’ll find the link and post it later, but what McIntyre found was an intentional manipulation of the data to produce the Hockey Stick. When he averaged the data in a way that made a bit more sense (the authors of the study would disagree of course), he found that it completely wiped out global warming trends…

And by the way, speaking of lack of global warming, how about this email:

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
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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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.***