Climategate Nonsense

Perhaps you do not follow the news too closely, or maybe you just don’t care, but if you aren’t one of those people it is hard to imagine how you did not see the recent “Climategate” blowup that every climate change denier on Earth grabbed hold of as the final nail in the coffin of AGW (Anthropogenic [man-made] global warming). For a little background information you can click here.

To break it down very simply, someone hacked the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit’s (CRU) e-mail, stealing thousands of private e-mails and leaking them onto the web for all to see. Climate change deniers quickly dove on these e-mails scanning them for any signs of malpractice or evidence that there is some sort of conspiracy to bolster their case.

Of the thousands of e-mails and conversations that were made available to the public, a very small handful of snippets were pointed to as the smoking gun, the final nail in the coffin and the end to the theory of man-made global warming. Those deniers (who call themselves skeptics, ha) quickly drummed up a lot of media attention, and got a lot of air time and press. They had found evidence that the CRU had tampered with the evidence and manipulated data to fit their claims. That is absolutely damning.

Or it would be if it were true. If you would like to start a drum roll on whatever surface you have nearby, I am about to present you the evidence that shows that man is NOT the cause of the biggest problem we’re facing today.

“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.” – Phil Jones of the CRU [full e-mail]

That’s it. Thousands of e-mails and we have this one quote, out of context, causing all of this noise. There are other examples that people point to showing that the scientists, when communicating in a way that they perceive as private, and not to be read by people they are not sending the e-mail to speak very critically, informally and sometimes crassly about subjects. In other words, they speak like you and I do when we have a private conversation.

The majority of the e-mails are exchanges between colleagues talking about the science. Their science, other people’s science, readying publications together. None of the e-mails talk about the global conspiracy to fool the world into thinking the globe is heating up. It’s all science.

The quote shown above is the best they’ve got. A small selection of words cherry picked from a large mass of benign e-mails and data.

Taken out of context, they could seem rather nefarious and diabolical. Particularly to laymen such as you and I (as I am unfortunately not a trained scientist) who do not communicate regularly with other scientists about our data and other relevant publications. However, given a little context, they join the rest of the e-mails as being rather benign and harmless.

The first selection out of that quote that has caused some stir is…

“I’ve just compiled Mike’s Nature trick…”

The trick in question here is not fooling someone, rather a way of presenting something to make it more clear. The trick referenced is from a paper of Michael Mann’s 1998 paper in Nature , and more cleanly and clearly explained by RealClimate -

“The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all.”

No, tomfoolery going on here. So what about the second part of the quote?

“[and] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

This is definitely the more dangerous part of the quote for those who are not educated about the way that climate science works and has evolved.

There is an issue within climate science known as the divergence problem. The divergence problem deals with tree ring data in correlation to recent hard data from temperature gathering instruments. Tree rings are a good way to look at temperature in the past, in cold years, the tree rings are smaller, in warm years, they are larger. Very simple, and for a period of time they were an important tool to look back and temperature data historically. However in the 1960′s the tree ring data and our temperature data begin to deviate. The world temperature is rising, but the tree ring data shows the opposite. RealClimate again has a more elegant explanation than I.

“As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.”

Non-issue.

The CRU has been subject to inquiry by 3 government bodies since this “climategate” to ensure that there was no scientific malpractice and that there was no evidence of data tampering. Two of those inquiries have come to a close with unsurprising, to those of us who have investigated the evidence with a clear head.

“The UK scientist at the center of the “Climategate” controversy over leaked e-mails has been cleared of hiding or manipulating data by a parliamentary committee.”

“Much of the controversy focused on one particular e-mail that Jones sent relating to the preparation of a figure for the WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999. He wrote: “I’ve just completed ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years … to hide the decline.”

But the Commons committee cleared him of malpractice here too, concluding: “On the much cited phrases in the leaked e-mails — “trick” and “hiding the decline” — the committee considers that they were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead.” [CNN]

The second inquiry recently finished as well and had similar things to say, with some suggestions on working with a wider body of statisticians to avoid things like this in the future.

“We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it,”

“The tree-ring work was considered by the panel to have been “carried out with integrity” and the methods used in the direct temperature work were “fair and satisfactory”. However, the lack of proper statistical input into CRU’s research did displease Oxburgh’s panel.

“We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians,” says their report.” [Nature]

We’re still waiting on the final inquiry to finish, but it very likely it will be in the same house as the two which have already concluded. It still hasn’t, and won’t silence the climate change deniers, but it does show how desperate they are to cling to their unscientific analysis of out of context quotes obtained illegally.

I as much as anyone else would rather we not had to worry about climate change, but facts are facts are facts. Science is science, it has no bias, it has no political leanings. It is what it is.