User:Wikidemon/Climategate scandal

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This article has been moved to Article Incubator/Climate Gate/. The below is preserved for historical reasons. For further work please visit the incubator. Also note some other preliminary work at User:Wikidemon/Climategate v2 - Wikidemon (talk) 21:57, 30 December 2009 (UTC) '

"Climategate" is a controversy that arose in November, 2009 following the unauthorized publication of electronic files on the subject of climate change research that had been obtained from a server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England.

Hacking incident
Unknown persons anonymously published, through multiple websites, thousands of e-mails and other documents archived over the course of 13 years, which the university and police authorities have since said were illegally obtained.

Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago, expressed concern at the precedent established by hacking scientific documents: "[T]his is a criminal act of vandalism and of harassment of a group of scientists that are only going about their business doing science. It represents a whole new escalation in the war on climate scientists who are only trying to get at the truth... What next? Deliberate monkeying with data on servers? Insertion of bugs into climate models?"

Content of the documents
The anonymously published material comprised more than 1,000 e-mails, 2,000 documents, as well as commented source code, covering a period from 1996 until 2009. Some e-mails included discussions of how to combat the arguments of climate change skeptics, unflattering comments about skeptics, queries from journalists, drafts of scientific papers, and discussions that some pundits and commentators said advocate keeping scientists who have contrary views out of peer-review literature. Most of the e-mails concerned technical and mundane aspects of climate research.

The controversy that arose involved a small number of e-mails, particularly those sent to or from climatologists Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, and Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University (PSU), one of the originators of the graph of temperature trends dubbed the "hockey stick graph". There is also discussion proposing to destroy various files in order to prevent data being revealed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The files also included temperature research software and documentation that some said were poorly designed and buggy, with "readme" comments described in various editorials and blogs to indicate that the software hid and manipulated data.

Terminology


The term "Climategate" is a reference to the Watergate scandal, used to suggest that there the incident is the subject of a scandal. London Daily Telegraph commentator Christopher Booker credits the appearance of the term to a news blog post written by his colleague, James Delingpole.

Controversy
A controversy arose after allegations were made that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific information, interfered with the peer-review process to prevent dissenting scientific papers from being published, deleted e-mails and raw data to prevent it from being revealed under the United Kingdom Freedom of Information Act, and manipulated data, all to make the case for the human influence on global warming appear stronger than it would otherwise appear.

Specific emails

 * An email authored by Phil Jones on 16 November 1999 described a "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."  Some critics cited this sentence as evidence of manipulation of temperature statistics,   although serveral scientific sources said that "decline" refers to replacing tree ring "proxy" metrics with actual temperature measurements, to deal with a "divergence problem" by which tree ring-derived temperature estimates had begun to diverge from actual temperatures.   }}  Others said that the term "trick" refers to a valid technique, not an act of deception.
 * An email from MMichael ann on 11 March 2003 questioned the viability of Climate Research as a citable peer-reviewed scientific journal, because he considered it activist.


 * An email from Jones to Mann called one of Mann's papers "just garbage" and pledged to "keep them out" of an upcoming IPCC report, "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"


 * An email from Jones to Mann on 2 February, 2005 contains a statement that Jones would "delete the file rather than send to anyone" should there be a UK equivalent of an American Freedom of Information Act request. There was no actual information request made and no claim that data was actually deleted.


 * An email written by climatologist Kevin Trenberth, 12 October, 2009, discussed an inability to "account for the lack of warming at the moment". Trenberth told the Associated Press that the phrase was used in reference to an article he authored calling for improvement in measuring global warming to describe unusual data. The word travesty refers to what Trenberth sees as an inadequate observing system that, were it more adequate, would be able to track the warming he believes is there.

Initial response
In an interview with The Guardian, Jones confirmed that the e-mails that had sparked the most controversy appeared to be genuine.

Climate scientists issued rebuttals and described the incident as a smear campaign, accusing the climate change "skeptics" of selectively quoting words and phrases out of context from the electronic files in an attempt to sabotage the Copenhagen global climate summit.

On November 24 the University of East Anglia issued a statement on the contents of the e-mails. The statement noted: "There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the highest quality of scientific investigation and interpretation. CRU’s peer-reviewed publications are consistent with, and have contributed to, the overwhelming scientific consensus that the climate is being strongly influenced by human activity."

Calls for inquiries
In the United Kingdom and United States, there were calls for official inquiries into issues raised by the documents, and calls for Jones' firing or resignation.

University of East Anglia response
CRU researchers said in a statement that the e-mails had been taken out of context and merely reflected an honest exchange of ideas. Phil Jones called statements that the e-mails involve "untoward" activity "ludicrous."

Shortly after the release of the e-mails, the university announced it would conduct an independent review to "address the issue of data security, an assessment of how we responded to a deluge of Freedom of Information requests, and any other relevant issues which the independent reviewer advises should be addressed".

According to the University of East Anglia, the documents and e-mails had been selected deliberately to undermine the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world's climate in ways that are potentially dangerous. The university said in a statement: "The selective publication of some stolen e-mails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way".

After initially rejecting demands for Jones to resign, the university announced on 1 December that he would stand aside temporarily as director of the Unit during the university's investigation. Two days later, the university announced that Sir Muir Russell would chair a review, and would "examine e-mail exchanges to determine whether there is evidence of suppression or manipulation of data" as well as review CRU's policies and practices for "acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review, and disseminating data and research findings" and "their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice". In addition, the investigation would review CRU's compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests and also 'make recommendations about the management, governance and security structures for CRU and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds".

George Monbiot strongly criticized the UEA's response, calling it "a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond." Monbiot continued, "The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline."

Met Office response
On December 5, after initially saying there was no need for an inquiry, the Met Office, a UK agency which works with the CRU in providing global-temperature information, indicated their intention to re-examine 160 years of temperature data, to confirm its understanding of global warming. as well as to release temperature records for over 1000 worldwide weather stations online.

Other responses
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the BBC that he considered the affair to be "a serious issue and we will look into it in detail." He later clarified that the IPCC would review the incident to identify lessons to be learned, and he rejected suggestions that the IPCC itself should carry out an investigation. The only investigations being carried out were those of the University of East Anglia and the British police. He characterized the scientists involved as "victims of [a] terrible and illegal act" done to influence political talks on climate change.

Michael E. Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center said that sceptics were "taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious" and called the incident a "high-level, orchestrated smear campaign to distract the public about the nature of the climate change problem". Pennsylvania State University announced it would review the work of Mann, in particular material which has not already been addressed in an earlier National Academy of Sciences review that had found some faults with his methodology but agreed with the results.

Kevin E. Trenberth stated that climate change sceptics had selectively quoted words and phrases out of context in an attempt to sabotage the Copenhagen global climate summit in December.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I issued statements explaining that the assessment process, involving hundreds of scientists worldwide, is designed to be transparent and to prevent any individual or small group to manipulate the process. The statement noted that the "internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these email exchanges".

Public reaction
In the wake of the controversy, a number of scientists became the target of harassment, including death threats. Tom Wigley, a former director of the CRU and now head of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, condemned threats that he and other colleagues had received as "truly stomach-turning", and commented: "None of it affects the science one iota." In relation to the harassment that he and his colleagues were experiencing, he noted: "This sort of thing has been going on at a much lower level for almost 20 years and there have been other outbursts of this sort of behaviour - criticism and abusive emails and things like that in the past. So this is a worse manifestation but it's happened before so it's not that surprising."

Some of the scientists involved said that not only the release of the email, but the subsequent controversy about climate change and intimidation of scientists involved, seemed to have been deliberately orchestrated. David Karoly of the University of Melbourne, reported receiving numerous hate e-mails in the wake of the incident and said that he believed there was "an organised campaign to discredit individual climate scientists". Andrew Pitman of the University of New South Wales commented: "The major problem is that scientists have to be able to communicate their science without fear or favour and there seems to be a well-orchestrated campaign designed to intimidate some scientists."

Climatologists
Some prominent climate scientists, such as Richard Somerville, called the incident a smear campaign.

Kevin E. Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said that he was appalled at the release of the e-mails but thought that it might backfire against climate sceptics, as the messages would show "the integrity of scientists." He has also said that the theft may be aimed at undermining talks at the December 2009 Copenhagen global climate summit.

The author and climatologist David Reay of the University of Edinburgh noted that the CRU "is just one of many climate-research institutes that provide the underlying scientific basis for climate policy at national and international levels. The conspiracy theorists may be having a field day, but if they really knew academia they would also know that every published paper and data set is continually put through the wringer by other independent research groups. The information that makes it into the IPCC reports is some of the most rigorously tested and debated in any area of science."

Concern over actions of scientists
Climatologist Hans von Storch said that the University of East Anglia (UEA) had "violated a fundamental principle of science" by refusing to share data with other researchers. "They play science as a power game," he said. Judith Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta wrote that the e-mails reflect a lack of openness about scientific data and an attack on dissenting opinions: "[I]t is difficult to understand the continued circling of the wagons by some climate researchers with guns pointed at sceptical researchers by apparently trying to withhold data and other information of relevance to published research, thwart the peer review process, and keep papers out of assessment reports. Scientists are of course human, and short-term emotional responses to attacks and adversity are to be expected, but I am particularly concerned by this apparent systematic and continuing behavior from scientists that hold editorial positions, serve on important boards and committees and participate in the major assessment reports. It is these issues revealed in the HADCRU emails that concern me the most [...]"

Political perception
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rejected the view that the leaked e-mails had damaged the credibility of climate science. Speaking at the Copenhagen conference on climate change, he said: "Nothing that has come out in the public as a result of the recent email hackings has cast doubt on the basic scientific message on climate change and that message is quite clear – that climate change is happening much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause."

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that there is no doubt about the scientific evidence that underpins the Copenhagen conference: "Its landmark importance cannot be wished away by the theft of a few emails from one university research centre." Brown commented that the purpose of the climate change skeptics' campaign was clear, and its timing was no coincidence. "It is designed to destabilise and undermine the efforts of the countries gathering in Copenhagen."

During a press briefing on December 7, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, "I think scientists are clear on the science. I think many on Capitol Hill are clear on the science. I think that this notion that there is some debate ... on the science is kind of silly."

Saudi Arabia's lead climate negotiator Mohammad Al-Sabban said he thought the incident will have a "huge impact" on the Copenhagen conference. "It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change," he told BBC News the week before the summit.

During the annual Queen's Speech debate in the House of Commons on 24 November 2009, the former Conservative Cabinet minister Peter Lilley challenged the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband over the e-mails. Miliband declined to comment on the content of the e-mails but commented: "We should be cautious about using partial emails that have been leaked to somehow cast doubt on the scientific consensus that there is. That is very dangerous and irresponsible because the scientific consensus is clear."

Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, an outspoken sceptic of climate change, said "Ninety-five percent of the nails were in the coffin prior to this week. Now they are all in." Inhofe stated on Fox News that an official investigation action has commenced, and that it will have an effect on the "Cap and Trade" legistlation.

Scientific community perception
In response to the incident, 1,700 British scientists signed a joint statement circulated by the UK Met Office declaring their "utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities." Met Office chief executive John Hirst and its chief scientist Julia Slingo asked their colleagues to sign the statement "to defend our profession against this unprecedented attack to discredit us and the science of climate change."

The American Meteorological Society stated that the incident did not affect the society's position on climate change. They pointed to the breadth of evidence for human influence on climate, stating "For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited."

The American Geophysical Union issued a statement expressing concern that the emails were "being exploited to distort the scientific debate about the urgent issue of climate change" and reaffirming their 2007 position statement with regard to human influences on climate. They stated that "Science and the scientific method is seldom a linear march to the 'correct' and indisputable answer. Disagreement among scientists is part of the energy that moves inquiry forward."

Climatologist James Hansen said that the controversy has "no effect on the science" and that while some of the e-mails reflect poor judgment, the evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.