The Climate Research Unit Emails and The Pentagon Papers

Gather.com / Greg Schiller (2009-11-21)

Early Tuesday, a security breach at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit resulted in the release of over 1,000 emails between many of the most celebrated names in the world’s climate research community.

The picture that emerges is not pretty.

The emails document a ten-year pattern of manipulating data, sabotaging journals, torpedoing careers of rivals, stonewalling the dissemination of data and obstructing Freedom of Information requests by lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.

The Climate Research Unit Emails and The Pentagon Papers

Gather.com / Greg Schiller (2009-11-21)

Early Tuesday, a security breach at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit resulted in the release of over 1,000 emails between many of the most celebrated names in the world’s climate research community.

The picture that emerges is not pretty.

The emails document a ten-year pattern of manipulating data, sabotaging journals, torpedoing careers of rivals, stonewalling the dissemination of data and obstructing Freedom of Information requests by lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.

The skeptics see the emails as smoking gun proof that the man-made climate change theory is a hoax.

Their detractors see it differently.

A website run by several of the email authors, RealClimate.org, recently went into full spin-control. In an unsigned posting, the authors write:

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords.

While the authors are correct about the absence of an over-arching conspiracy, there is plenty run-of-the-mill conspiracy. The emails detail collusion to hide data from the public and to obstruct legal Freedom Of Information Requests.

Reading the emails brings to mind the incident that more than any other was a catalyst to open government to the governed, The Pentagon Papers.

Like The Climate Research Unit Emails, The Pentagon Papers were working correspondence of the leaders and analysts who managed relations between the United States and Vietnam in the mid-20th century. Like the scientists at the CRU, these people also expected privacy in their communication and were shocked to see them published.

When The Pentagon Papers were made public, it was also interesting was what was not revealed. To paraphrase RealClimate.org

There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of corporations nefariously plotting to colonize Asia, no grand plan to ‘get rid of freedom’ no ‘marching orders’ from our capitalist/corporate overlords

However there was plenty of conspiracy, primarily to hide data from the public.

Sound familiar?

There was also something else. RealClimate.org puts that well also.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined.

That is correct. Both The Pentagon Papers and the Climate Research Unit Emails provide an interesting insight into human nature. Scientists and policy makers are human. They are subject to the same vanities, stubborness, beliefs, arrogance and squabbles as the rest of us – but that is the problem.

When lives are at stake, as was the case with Vietnam, or the global economy is at stake, as is the case with climate legislation, the world cannot afford vanity, stubbornness, religion, arrogance and squabbles.

That is why we have laws which mandate transparency in business and government. It is why we have things like Freedom of Information Requests.

It is a bitter irony that so much of the correspondence in The Climate Research Unit Emails are about withholding data from the public, deleting information and refusing to comply with Freedom of Information Requests in violation of the law.

It is also a bitter irony that the process which governs what is sold as the most important issue of our time, climate change, is not subject to the same level of scrutiny as is a neighborhood zoning decision.

At a minimum the 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen must be canceled until the IPCC can rework its governance structure for complete transparency, otherwise, there will be something very rotten in Denmark.

There is a wonderful conversation taking place over at William M. Brigg’s blog. Brigg is a statistician at The University of East Anglia, in other words, he is a colleage of many of the people in the emails.

Here is what he says.

A lot of people in those emails are deeply concerned about the lack of observed warming (it has actually been getting just a little cooler). Some lay the blame at the feet of the certain components of the models, others try to dismiss the observed cooling, still more advocate statistical manipulation to mask the cooling so the public and its leaders don’t get confused.

It’s far to early to give a concise summary of this scandal. So, caution, friends. Don’t rush to judgment. It’s too easy in situations like this for statements to come back and bite you.

I have seen the files—not all of them, there are too many—and my early take doesn’t change the view I have already formed: climate models have no skill beyond about one year. The models predict warming, but the warming isn’t there, therefore the models are wrong. Why they are wrong is an interesting question, and worth investigating. Many of the emails responsibly take this tack. And they should.

I have not seen open acknowledgement that the premise that forms the models is false. That is, that it is possible, even with the observed small increase in atmospheric CO2, that that gas has at best a marginal effect. As far as I can tell by my early reading, all the folks in those emails truly believe their models (it’s the observations they don’t love).

A comment on his blog reads.

For a topic like this, secrecy is not OK – I don’t mean that private emails should be published, but that scientific papers should be more thoroughly reviewed by hostile reviewers (the word “peer” seems to mean “friend” these days), and the published paper should contain everything needed to duplicate the result, including (links to) source data and working source code, with full details of where the data came from. They also really need to be honest and public about their levels of certainty in their work.

Beyond problems of method, I suppose the other interesting confirmation is that the face presented to politicians and the media is not telling the truth, or at the very least is overconfident about the theories’ provenness. For example, it is refreshing to see acknowledgement from a source of CRU’s calibre that the current climate trend was unpredicted and is hard to explain with existing models. It certainly contrasts with what the media was told a few years ago, and shows that scientific organizations do way too much PR.