A month before Copenhagen, over a thousand emails to and from scientists at the UEA’s Climatic Research Unit, together with three thousand other documents, found their way onto the internet. It was soon dubbed Climategate.
The origins of Climategate lay in the IPCC’s attempt to quarantine the Hockey Stick without repudiating it. Doing so meant subverting IPCC principles. All parts of the IPCC assessment process, Sir John Houghton wrote in 2002
need to be completely open and transparent. IPCC documents including early drafts and review comments have been freely and widely available – adding much to the credibility of the process and its conclusions.[14]
The aim of IPCC reports is to summarise the latest science. The IPCC was therefore duty bound to report McIntyre and McKitrick’s critique of the Hockey Stick – unless they could find a more recent study that sidelined their conclusions. So that’s what they set out to do.
They consulted two unpublished papers by Caspar Ammann and Eugene Wahl. After a couple of attempts, the first paper was turned down by Geophysical Research Letters. Stephen Schneider facilitated provisional acceptance of the second in Climatic Change to meet the IPCC deadline. The published (and reviewed) version had verification statistics that corroborate McIntyre and McKitrick’s critique, but fell outside the IPCC’s deadline. So the final IPCC text claimed McIntyre and McKitrick were unable to reproduce Mann’s results (they could, using Mann’s algorithm) but that Wahl and Ammann could when using Mann’s original methods (without mentioning that Wahl and Ammann’s published paper reported that the reconstruction failed a verification test).[15]
As an IPCC reviewer, McIntyre prodded the lead authors to show the decline on the Briffa temperature reconstruction. Don’t stop in 1960 – ‘then comment and deal with the “divergence problem” if you need to.’[16]
When published, the comment was there, but the decline wasn’t.
After publication, McIntyre wanted to see how his comments had been handled. Rejected, still considered inappropriate to show the recent section of Briffa’s reconstruction, was the editorial response.[17] The trail led back to the UK and to the Chapter Six review editor, John Mitchell of the Met Office.
On 21st June 2007, David Holland, a semi-retired engineer, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the UK government department responsible for oversight of the IPCC review records. He followed in January 2008 with requests to the Met Office.
The story Holland was told kept changing. First; Mitchell’s records had been deleted; then, Mitchell’s involvement in the IPCC had been in a personal capacity; finally, release of Mitchell’s emails would prejudice relations between the UK and an international organisation and that the IPCC – contrary to its policy of openness and transparency – refused to waive confidentiality.[18]
In May, Holland sent Freedom of Information requests to Reading and Oxford universities and to the University of East Anglia about the change in the deadline for the Wahl and Ammann paper. Within two days, Phil Jones emailed Mann:
Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4 [the Fourth Assessment Report]? Keith will do likewise … Can you also email Gene [Wahl] and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address … We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.[19]
Mann forwarded the email to Wahl, who told a Department of Commerce investigation that he ‘believes he deleted the referenced emails at that time’.[20]
On the morning of 17th November 2009 someone tried to upload 160MB of data from the CRU server onto the RealClimate website. They must have had a sense of humour – RealClimate was established with a mission to fight McIntyre in the blogosphere Hockey Stick wars. Later that day, an anonymous poster, FOIA, appeared on the climate sceptic Air Vent website.
We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.[21]
The blogosphere lit up. The mainstream media was slower, apparently queasy at publishing private emails and unsure whether they were genuine. Three days later, the University of East Anglia confirmed they were.
It is hard to conceive of a less favourable run-up to the Copenhagen climate change negotiations. The CRU’s initial reaction of going to ground only made it worse. The Met Office’s Vicky Pope was left branding the release of the emails ‘a shallow and transparent attempt to discredit the robust science undertaken by some of the world’s most respected scientists’.[22] George Monbiot in the Guardian thought otherwise. ‘Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial,’ Monbiot wrote.[23] ‘There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific.’[24]
Two prominent climate scientists agreed. ‘The whole concept of “we’re the experts, trust us” has clearly gone by the wayside with these emails,’ Judith Curry of Georgia’s Institute of Technology, told Andrew Revkin of the New York Times.[25] Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia told Revkin that ‘the IPCC itself, through its structural tendency to politicise climate change science, has perhaps helped foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production’.[26]
The following weekend, the Sunday Times carried a story that the University of East Anglia had thrown away records from which the temperature reconstructions had been derived. The original numbers had been dumped to save space. Roger Pielke Jr of Colorado University discovered the loss when he asked for the original records. ‘The CRU is basically saying, “Trust us,”’ Pielke said.[27]
The disclosure fed speculation that the CRU had been fiddling its surface temperature reconstruction, one of the three principal ones used in climate studies derived mainly from the Global Historical Climatology Network.* There was another explanation. Proper record keeping was hardly one of the CRU’s strengths. In 2002, historian James Fleming, writing a short biography of Guy Stewart Callendar, was shocked to find that Callendar’s papers at the CRU hadn’t been stored properly. As a result, the CRU agreed to loan the papers to Colby College, Maine, where they were organised into archive boxes.[28]
In December, the Met Office wrote to seventy scientists at British universities asking them to collect signatures for a statement to ‘defend our profession against this unprecedented attack’. Over one thousand, seven hundred scientists signed.[29]
The evidence and the science are deep and extensive. They come from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity. That research has been subject to peer review and publication, providing traceability of the evidence and support for the scientific method.[30]
It all looked somewhat desperate. ‘The response has been absolutely spontaneous,’ Julia Slingo, the Met’s chief scientist improbably claimed. An anonymous scientist spoke of being put under pressure to sign. ‘The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming.’[31]
At the beginning of December, the University of East Anglia announced it was establishing an independent review into the CRU emails headed by Sir Muir Russell, a retired civil servant. Meanwhile the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee started an inquiry of its own. It became clear that the Met Office’s December statement on behalf of the UK science community was not universal. The Royal Society of Chemistry argued that the nature of science dictated that research be transparent and robust enough to survive scrutiny. ‘A lack of willingness to disseminate scientific information may infer that the scientific results or methods are not robust enough to face scrutiny, even if this conjecture is not well founded.’[32]
The Royal Statistical Society argued for publication of data.
‘Science progresses as an ongoing debate and not by a series of authoritative and oracular pronouncements.’[33] Commercial exploitation was not a valid reason to withhold data. If a company is granted a patent, the details of the invention must be revealed – ‘it cannot justifiably seek reimbursement for that knowledge and not make it available’.[34] All parties needed to have access to the facts. ‘It is well understood, for example, that peer review cannot guarantee that what is published is “correct.”’[35]
The Institute of Physics was concerned about the integrity of scientific research. The emails constituted ‘prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law’.[36] A wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in the CRU’s field of research was needed, the Institute argued.
Of all the congressional and parliamentary hearings on global warming, the Science and Technology Committee’s hearing on 1st March 2010 was the most important since Hansen’s appearance in 1988. The inquiry had been prompted by Labour’s Graham Stringer. By the time it began, it was on a compressed timetable ahead of the May 2010 general election, with a single extended hearing.[37] The hearing didn’t resolve the scientific issues. Its importance was in raising a question mark over apparently settled science.
It was also Phil Jones’ first public appearance since the story broke. Fleet Street’s parliamentary sketch-writers reported from the packed committee room. For the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart, Jones brought back memories of the weapons scientist David Kelly shortly before his suicide in the run-up to the Iraq war. ‘The resemblance was disturbing and painful,’ Hoggart wrote.[38] Jones looked ‘taut, nervous, often miserable. At times his hands shook’.[39] His low spot, Hoggart thought, came when Stringer, with a Ph.D. in chemistry, asked Jones about not making data available because all they’d do is find something wrong with it. ‘Yes, I have obviously written some very awful emails.’[40]
Jones’ appearance hadn’t been made easier by the committee’s first witness. ‘With the aggression of someone who used to go eyeball to eyeball with Margaret Thatcher,’ Hoggart wrote that former chancellor Nigel Lawson
spoke with dripping contempt. ‘Proper scientists, scientists with integrity, wish to reveal their data and all their methods. They do not require freedom of information requests!’[41]
According to the Telegraph’s Andrew Gimson: ‘One hammer blow followed another, culminating in the crushing accusation from Lord Lawson that for the period before 1421, the scientists “relied on one single pine tree” to establish how hot the world was, “which was more than it [the pine tree] could bear.”’*[42]
Professor Edward Acton, the university’s vice chancellor, provided Quentin Letts with comic relief, a younger version of Professor Calculus from the Tintin books, Letts wrote in the Daily Mail, nodding and beaming at everything Jones said,
his eyeballs bulged with admiration for the climate change supremo. His eyes were pulled so wide in wonderment they must have nearly split down the seams like banana skins. Others, watching the tremulous Professor Jones, will have been less impressed. He may be right about man-made climate change. But you do rather hope that politicians sought second, third, even twentieth opinions before swallowing his theories and trying to change the world’s industrial output.[43]
More than a year later, what surprised Stringer most about the hearing was Jones’ ‘astonishing’ admission that his temperature series wasn’t reproducible. Although the data-sets remain available, the computer programs had changed. Scientists – and Jones himself – couldn’t reproduce his graph.[44] ‘That is just a fact of life in climate sciences,’ Jones had told the committee.[45]
* The Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) contains eight thousand series whereas the CRU only uses two thousand. Despite the importance of global warming and therefore the monitoring of temperature trends, by 2005, the GHCN sample size has fallen by over seventy-five per cent from its peak in 1975 to less than any time since 1919. Ross McKitrick, ‘A Critical Review of Global Surface Temperature Data Products’ (unpublished, 2010) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1653928
* It was actually worse than Lawson implied. Mann interpolated values for the first five years (1400–1404) of the Gaspé series, the only series going back to the fifteenth century because there were zero trees for this period. Stephen McIntyre & Ross McKitrick, ‘Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) Proxy Data base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series’ in Energy & Environment Vol. 14, No. 6 (2003), Table 5.
[1] An Inconvenient Truth, Participant Productions (2006).
[2] http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=main&id=inconvenienttruth.htm
[3] http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=fahrenheit911.htm
[4] An Inconvenient Truth.
[5] Bert Bolin, A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), p. 208.
[6] ibid., p. 212.
[7] ibid.
[8] An Inconvenient Truth.
[9] Eric Steig, ‘Al Gore’s movie’ 10th May 2006 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/al-gores-movie/
[10] An Inconvenient Truth.
[11] Stephen McIntyre, ‘Gore Scientific “Adviser” says that he has no “responsibility” for AIT errors’ 13th January 2008 http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/13/sticking-thermometers-in-places-they-dont-belong/
[12] R.K. Pauchauri and A. Reisinger (ed.), Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), p. 5.
[13] The Norwegian Nobel Committee, ‘The Nobel Peace Prize for 2007’ 12th October 2007 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/press.html
[14] J.T. Houghton, ‘An Overview of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Its Process of Science Assessment’ in Issues in Environmental Science and Technology, No. 17, Royal Society of Chemistry (2002), p. 6.
[15] Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (ed.), Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), p. 466.
[16] Stephen McIntyre, ‘Climategate: A Battlefield Perspective – Annotated Notes for Presentation to Heartland Conference, Chicago’ 16th May 2010, p. 15 www.climateaudit.info/pdf/mcintyre-heartland_2010.pdf
[17] ibid.
[18] Stuart Matthews letter to David Holland, 19th August 2008.
[19] Phil Jones email to Michael Mann (Mann’s response dated 29th May 2008.
[20] Todd J. Zinser letter to Senator James Inhofe, 18th February 2011 http://www.environbusiness.com/News/2011.02.18_IG_to_Inhofe.pdf
[21] Jeff Id, ‘OK it’s blown wide open’ 19th November 2009 http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/ok-its-blown-wide-open/
[22] Andrew Revkin, ‘Hacked E-Mail Data Prompts Calls for Changes in Climate Research’ in the New York Times, 28th November 2009.
[23] George Monbiot, ‘Pretending the climate email leak isn’t a crisis won’t make it go away’ in the Guardian, 25th November 2011.
[24] ibid.
[25] Revkin, ‘Hacked E-Mail Data Prompts Calls for Changes in Climate Research’ in the New York Times, 28th November 2009.
[26] ibid.
[27] Jonathan Leake, ‘Climate change data dumped’ in the Sunday Times, 29th November 2009.
[28] James Rodger Fleming, The Callendar Effect (2007), p. 94.
[29] Ben Webster, ‘Top scientis
ts rally to the defence of the Met Office’ in The Times, 10th December 2009.
[30] The Met Office, ‘Statement from the UK science community’ 10th December 2009 http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2009/science-community-statement
[31] Webster, ‘Top scientists rally to the defence of the Met Office’ in The Times, 10th December 2009.
[32] House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia Eighth Report of Session 2009–10, Volume II (2010), Ev 171.
[33] ibid., Ev 186.
[34] ibid.
[35] ibid.
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 37