The Chronology of ClimateGate

After a short acid-rain intermezzo in the 1980's, the doomsday visions suddenly turned from a catastrophical ice age to a catastrophical rise in global temperatures. The media presented artist's renderings of dried-out, burnt lands and of flooded cities where only the tips of spires remained visible above the rising sea levels. And the media reported faithfully about the new type of approaching doom.

In 1999, physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson explained some of the events that led to the radical change of the predictions from ice to heat:

In the nineteen-sixties the fluid dynamicist Syukuro Manabe was running global climate models on the supercomputer at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton. Manabe began very early (before it became fashionable) to run models of climate with variable amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He ran models with carbon dioxide at two and four times the present abundance, and saw in the computer output the rise in average ground temperature that is now called Global Warming. He told everybody not to believe the numbers. But the politicians in Washington believed. They wanted numbers, he gave them numbers, so they naturally believed the numbers.

Meanwhile, weather stations were built, weather balloons were launched, satellites recorded temperature, and computers, ever more powerful, continued to predict catastrophical warming from atmospheric models that were more and more refined.

As it happens in science, dissenting voices turned up. Some scientists argued, for example, how climate models were adjusted. Computer models of the atmosphere contain a large number of empirical factors. Most commonly, those factors are determined by starting the model in the past and advancing the prediction to the present. Then, the factors (in Freeman Dyson's words, fudge factors) are adjusted so that the model output matches the present climate. With the fudge factors calibrated in this manner, the models are now allowed to continue the prediction into the future. However, many of these factors have no physical basis, and it is not known whether those factors are constant over time. Furthermore, climate models are nonlinear and therefore extremely sensitive towards changes of the initial conditions or of model parameters. This sensitivity has been reported [1,2], and disparities between model predictions and measured temperature were observed [3,4].

Normally, a healthy scientific discourse would emerge, and scientists would work on resolving discrepancies and contradictions. In the end, scientists striving to find the truth would have advanced human knowledge. Not so in the case of global warming. The doomsday scenario of man-made climate change morphed into a dogmatic belief system, and dissenters were hushed up or ridiculed. Meanwhile, a very strong alliance of special-interest groups had formed that benefited from global warming doomsday predictions:

1. Politicians. Any crisis, including an environmental threat, allows politicians to gain power. If the populace is convinced that legislative action is needed, politicians find it easy to levy new taxes or introduce more regulation.
2. Media. Bad news sell better than good news. Reports of environmental threats and of actual disasters sell well. Furthermore, many media corporations support the big-government agenda.
3. Environmentalist groups. Their revenue and membership increases when people are convinced of an environmental threat.
4. Scientists in climate research. Given the political interest in the global warming issue, they benefit through more research funds.
5. Lawyers. Many high-profile environmental-political lawsuits turn out to be very profitable.
6. Subsidized industries. Governmental support for alternative energies provides additional revenue sources at taxpayer's expense.

The ranks of global warming dissenters swelled over the years, but this process went widely unnoticed by the general public because of biased reporting by the media. Dissenting scientists were branded "skeptics" and "deniers". Web sites like climateaudit.org and conferences such as the International Conference on Climate Change remain insufficiently publicized.

Now, something unheard of has happened. On November 20, the New Zealand Investigative Magazine's TGIF Edition [5] reported that hundreds of megabytes of internal files from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) have been leaked to the Internet. CRU director Phil Jones confirmed that the files are from his institute [5]. For the first time, e-mails, internal documents, and program code is available for public scrutiny.

This article focuses primarily on the evolution of events after the leak. With this chronology, the reaction of scientsts, politicians, media, and the public can be studied. The question that we are asking as we are assembling the chronology of events (today, 11-30-2009) is whether the powerful special-interest groups will be able to hush up the ClimateGate scandal, or whether scientific integrity will prevail through a thorough investigation of the allegiations, followed, if the outcome of the investigation so requires, by a correction of policies. The long-term direction that this scandal will take is - at present - not forseeable.

11-17-2009:

The IP address of the originating server indicates a proxy server that facilitates anonymous access. It appears very difficult to trace the identity of the hacker.

11-19-2009:

A few links to the file FOI2009.zip are:

• Filedropper
• Piratebay
• Megaupload
• Onlytorrents
• Mediafire

11-20-2009:

Realclimate reacts quickly with a blog post that is continually updated over the next few days. This blog clearly aims at painting a "business as usual" picture where any of the criticisms are mere exaggerations or misunderstandings. Particularly obvious is the strategy by Realclimate.org to paint those who analyze the data as right-wing conspiracy nutcases:

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. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Many readers will recognize this as the "straw man fallacy" where the basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. The other agruments in the blogs are not much more convincing. Take, for example,

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

Yes, e-mails are intended to be private, so they are often more revealing than the cleaned-up information that gets published. In fact, this attribute of e-mail traffic makes the leaked documents so damning. And the admission that "many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard" is most unfortunate, because science is about a debate of the facts, not about who holds whom in what regard, or who "believes" what. Only facts count. And the Douglass, Soon, and McClean papers "are not very good"? Says who? The climate dogmaticists? "Should not have been published"? Is this not exactly in line with the accusations of the so-called skeptics that the peer-review process has been rigged?

Clearly, any post by Realclimate.org needs to be carefully examined for scientific bias (so should posts from the dissenting side).

11-21-2009:

James Delingpole of the UK Telegraph has compiled a more comprehensive overview of the early media reaction in various newspapers. One of the key findings at this point in time, discovered by a reader, is actually a passage in the file FOIA/documents/HARRY_READ_ME.txt that deals with Harry's work on the CRU TS2.1/3.0 datasets, 2006-2009 (emphasis added):

Here, the expected 1990-2003 period is MISSING - so the correlations aren't so hot! Yet the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah - there is no 'supposed', I can make it up. So I have :-)

Can make it up? Here: If an update station matches a 'master' station by WMO code, but the data is unpalatably inconsistent, the operator is given the choice of giving an existing station a false code, and making the update the new WMO station. (NB. A WMO station code is a five digit numerical code for World Meteorological Organization weather stations). There are more gems in this file. Just browse through it!

11-22-2009:

11-23-2009:

Independent from this development, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article by Richard Tol titled "The Costs of Climate Change". In this article, a very critical analysis of the economic costs for fighting an alleged climate change is given, and Richard Tol asserts that reputable studies do not paint doomsday scenarios, and that EU climate policies are over-ambitious. Furthermore, in the short run, world economy may even benefit from higher temperatures (see figure). This assertion is in agreement with analyses by Bjorn Lomborg. The same day, the decidedly pro-alarmist Science Magazine published a Science Insider blog entry where serious concerns about the climatologists's responses to FOI requests were voiced. Science Insider is continually updating their blog.

11-24-2009:

The University of East Anglia publishes on its web site lengthy statements from Prof Trevor Davies, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Prof Phil Jones, and from CRU. These statements contain complete denial of any wrongdoing by the CRU and its affiliates.

11-25-2009:

Fittingly, a satirical video clip is made public where Michael Mann is parodied singing the song "Hide the Decline":

11-26-2009:

The same day, as reported by The New York Times' Dot Earth Blog, IPCC head Rajendra K. Pachauri issued a statement of IPCC's position on ClimateGate. Dr. Pachauri vehemently denies that scientific fraud or foul play may have happened and reasserts that immediate action is needed to prevent catastrophic atmospheric heating.

11-27-2009:

This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.

Furthermore, even the New York Times now admits in an article Hacked E-Mail Data Prompts Calls for Changes in Climate Research that an investigation of the events is needed. In this article, three main issues are named: the issue of withheld raw data, the issue of questionable data treatment, and the issue of preventing publication of dissenting views. Unfortunately, the NYT then returns to its true self and tries to conjure up the imperssion of an overreaction by the skeptics:

Dr. Curry and others said that if nothing else, the e-mail correspondence suggested that climate scientists needed to show more temperance in dealing with their critics.   "We won the war, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and climate and energy legislation is near the top of the U.S. agenda," Dr. Curry said. "Why keep fighting all these silly battles and putting ourselves in this position?"

Possibly one of the most important events, Realclimate.org posts a link to raw and processed climate data, and software (partially with source code). Provided that the raw data are really raw and not pre-embellished with some "trick", this step is a giant leap towards more transparency in climate research.

11-28-2009:

11-29-2009:

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. The UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

Interestingly, some of the leaked e-mails deal with circumventing Freedom of Information legislation. From a science perspective, deletion of raw data in a disputed field of research is highly unethical.

11-30-2009:

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal digs deeper into questions of climate science. Bret Stephens analyzes the role of grants and gifts in the scandal. Richard S. Lindzen emphasizes that a real consensus does not exist. He concludes,

Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.

In the same issue, L. Gordon Crovitz summarizes in his article The Web Discloses Inconvenient Climate Truths how the Internet played a role in revealing the climate scandal. He writes,

For anyone who doubts the power of the Internet to shine light on darkness, the news of the month is how digital technology helped uncover a secretive group of scientists who suppressed data, froze others out of the debate, and flouted freedom-of-information laws. Their behavior was brought to light when more than 1,000 emails,and some 3,500 additional files were published online, many of which boasted about how they suppressed hard questions about their data. (...) The [IPCC], which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, now faces the inconvenient truth that it relied on scientists who violated scientific process. In one email, the Climate Research Unit's director, Phil Jones, wrote Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, promising to spike studies that cast doubt on the relationship between human activity and global warming. "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," he said. He pledged to "keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

12-01-2009:

The Australian Senate narrowly votes down ETS, the Emission Trade Laws bill. It is suspected that ClimateGate may have played a role when two liberal senators broke ranks with their party.

12-05-2009:

Meanwhile, the New Media try to keep the discussion alive. Some noteworthy articles appeared in American Thinker (location of CO2 measuring stations, comparison between climate alarmists and the Luddites), and the UK Telegraph, where author Delingpole writes,

(...) the BBC is slowly, grudgingly acknowledging that Climategate might be more than just a little local difficulty at some obscure redbrick university department. On this morning's BBC Radio 4 Today programme, it gave it a full 12 minutes. Needless to say, it stacked the odds heavily against the one man - climatologist Professor Philip Stott - brave enough to stick up for scientific integrity and rationalism and against Climate Change Hysteria. Not only was the debate sandwiched between reports by two of the BBC's in-house greens Roger Harrabin and Richard Black trying to play the story down (the Climategate emails offer not a smoking gun but a "confused and half-baked picture" claimed Black), but we then had to put up with presenter John Humphrys ganging up with badger-bottomed climate-fear-promoter the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt against Stott.

Perhaps there is still some evolution, but the ClimateGate scandal is losing momentum. Yet, an unbiased discussion of climate science is never as urgent as now where the ramifications of fraudulent science reach far beyond the ivory tower. A few articles in the Wall Street Journal highlight these implications:

• Daniel Henninger discusses the implications of the scandal on the public perception of, and trust in, objective science
• "Climategate? What Climategate?", an article that observes how lawmakers in congress widely ignore the scandal.
• R.K. Lester explains the "High Costs of Copenhagen" and outlines "What Obama's pledge to reduce emissions by 83% would mean in practice. "
• We read that East Anglia University launched a probe into the scandal, but attempts to "damp the furor over thousands of hacked private emails involving its researchers". Quoted from the article, "UEA's vice chancellor said Dr. Jones would take a lower profile in the aftermath of the scandal. 'He'll continue his scientific work, though how much of it will be at UEA remains to be seen,' Edward Acton said. He added that the university isn't 'hounding him out.' - Prof. Acton, however, also said Dr. Jones 'may have to take a rest.' He didn't elaborate."

12-07-2009:

U.N. Panel to Probe Claims on Manipulating Climate Data - "Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the BBC the allegations were serious". We may ask, though, how serious this probe will be. Consider: What happens to Rajendra Pachauri and his climate polito-scientists when the probe finds that the climate data had been faked and there is no global warming? Unemployment? Moreover, Wall Street Journal's Bret Stepens argues compellingly that belief in global warming has more the characteristics of an intolerant and dogmatic religous faith than fact-based science.

L. Gordon Crovitz publishes an important article, Climate of Uncertainty Heats Up - Bloggers peer review a scientific 'consensus'. The facts about climate data fudging became widely known only because of the Internet. In fact, it is the new power of the Internet that allows a true peer-review process of the revealed documents, whereas the academic peer- review process was crushed by the interest groups. One example - "crowdsourcing". Meteorologist Anthony Watts got help from 600 volunteers to examine the reliability of the 1200 US weather stations. The results are devastating. Almost all of those stations violate the government's standards by being too close to heating vents, A/C units, or being surrounded by asphalt.

12-08-2009:

Two noteworthy op-ed pieces, The Copenhagen Concoction: The U.N.'s climate confab runs into the reality of costs and science and An Inconvenient Democracy - The EPA aims to bully Congress and business with its carbon ruling. Moreover, Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel explains the potential political and economic fallout of the EPA ruling.

12-10-2009:

One scientist told The Times he felt 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," he said.

So, 1700 signatures. Here is my counter offer: The Petition Project with presently 31,486 signatures, including 9,029 from scientists with PhD degrees, signing there is no convincing evidence of man-made global warming:

12-12-2009:

U.N. climate chief cashes in on carbon, Tied to conglomerate that stands to make hundreds of millions in emissions scheme    A Mumbai-based Indian multinational conglomerate with business ties to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman since 2002 of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, stands to make several hundred million dollars in European Union carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain with the loss of 1,700 jobs.     The Tata Group headquartered in Mumbai anticipates receiving windfall profits of up to nearly $2 billion from closing the Corus Redcar steelmaking plant in Britain, with about half of the savings expected to result from cashing in on carbon credits granted the steelmaker by the European Union under the EU's emissions trading scheme, or ETS.

Carbon trading is good... for a few individuals. In light of this discovery, it is amusing to read the parallel chronology of the pro-alarmist side at The Wonk Room of the Center for American Progress, which attempts a smear campaign to paint warming skeptics as puppets of a big-industry-controlled "right-wing noise machine". Nice try, CAP wonks. Better luck next time. And before I forget - I guess I must consider myself part of the right-wing noise machine, too. So here are some of my finest noise samples for your enjoyment:

• White noise
• 1/f noise
• Brown noise

12-16-2009:

An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal follows the same line of thought:

The G-77 scoffed at a European offer of €7.2 billion ($10 billion) over three years. Instead, the Sudanese chairman of the group, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, suggested in an interview with Mother Jones magazine that something on the order of a trillion dollars, or more, would be appropriate.     "The world's scientists and policy decision makers have publicly stated that this is the greatest risk humanity has ever faced," says Mr. Di-Aping. "Now if that's the case, it's very strange that $10 billion is considered adequate financing." Mr. Di-Aping deserves credit for taking the climate alarmists on their own terms and drawing consistent conclusions.

12-17-2009:

Meanwhile, the CRU leak and new developments around the ClimateGate scandal have received little attention. In one article, "How to manufacture a consensus", Patrick Michaels explains in detail the depth of manipulation that biased the peer review process. Patrick Michaels is the scientist of whom Mr. Santer wrote in an e-mail to Mr. Jones (the file is FOIA/mail/1255100876.txt):

I'm really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.

And Patrick Michaels clearly considers himself a non-skeptic. Talking about rigid dogmaticism...

12-18-2009:

The Copenhagen Shakedown takes a look at the economic costs. To quote from the article,

Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the Malthusian 1972 classic "The Limits to Growth," also served up some climate honesty in a recent interview with Der Spiegel. "I lived long enough in a country like Afghanistan to know that I don't want us to have to live like that in the future. But we have to learn to live a life that allows for fulfillment and development, with the CO2 emissions of Afghanistan."

The solution? Meadows thinks one or two billion people is all the planet can sustain. And how will this solution be achieved?

12-21-2009:

A completely different picture. We submit that countries like Japan, UK, and Germany should pay the U.S.A. carbon credits - payable in gold bullion - for absorbing their CO₂.

12-24-2009:

Where do you draw the line, sis? Is scientific fraud allowed when the end justifies the means? If this is the case, where do you actually stop? Is minor fudging and data embellishment still allowed? Is major data falsification allowed if it serves a noble goal? Who defines what ends justify the means? Will it be you who places a priority on sustainable living, or the subsidized bio-ethanol farmers who place a priority on using corn to burn in car's tanks?

Open message to my sister and all who think like her: Your attitude must be rejected. There is no justification for fraud. After the first step towards corruption, the second follows much easier. Down this path, you - the scientist - will be dominated by the whims of politicians or by short-sighted ideology. Science must remain impartial and advance human knowledge rather than advance a political agenda. Once science becomes corrupt, public support will wane. Once public trust in science has taken a severe blow, where will you be?

01-24-2010:

it turns out that this widely publicized prediction was taken from a 2005 report from the World Wildlife Fund, which based it on a comment by Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain from 1999. Mr. Hasnian now says he was "misquoted." Even more interesting is that the IPCC was warned in 2006 by leading glaciologist Georg Kaser that the 2035 forecast was baseless. "This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude," Mr. Kaser told the Agence France-Presse. "It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing."

Indeed, the WWF has issued a correction to its 2005 report (local copy). The Global Warming Policy Foundation (local copyexamined the review process that the 2007 IPCC report was undergoing and found that reviewers (and therefore the authors) wre aware of the inconsistencies. Reviewer Hayley Fowler (Newcastle University) wrote:

I am not sure that this is true for the very large Karakoram glaciers in the western Himalaya. Hewitt (2005) suggests from measurements that these are expanding - and this would certainly be explained by climatic change in preciptiation and temperature trends seen in the Karakoram region (Fowler and Archer, J Climate in press; Archer and Fowler, 2004) You need to quote Barnett et al.'s 2005 Nature paper here - this seems very similar to what they said.

The authors of the 2007 IPCC report assured that they would include the references but in the end failed to do so. Research ethics at the IPCC.

Meanwhile, the above-cited Wall Street Journal article provides a summary of some of debunked global warming alarms:

Among them: that 1998 was the warmest year on record in the United States (it was 1934); that sea levels could soon rise by up to 20 feet and put Florida underwater (an 18-inch rise by the year 2100 is the more authoritative estimate); that polar bears are critically endangered by global warming (most polar bear populations appear to be stable or increasing); that -- well, we could go on without even mentioning the climategate emails.

Let us keep in mind that there is no evidence of a sea level change as large as 1.8 inch per year. The TOPEX/POSEIDON project at the Center for Space Research, UT Austin, found a 3.1mm/year (0.12 inch/year) rise, not statistically significant.

April 2010:

Two investigations are underway, the investigation of East Anglia's CRU and the investigation of the IPCC. Whereas the IPCC investigation is pending and we have not yet heard anything of it, the investigation of the CRU came up negative. According to the Wall Street Journal, the panel concluded that the CRU scientists did not commit any deliberate scientific malpractice:

The review found the scientists were "dedicated if slightly disorganized." It did question their statistical methods, saying it was "very surprising" they hadn't worked more closely with professional statisticians.   The inquiry panel, headed by Ron Oxburgh, the former chair of the House of Lords science and technology committee, was set up by the University of East Anglia to look at the research produced by scientists at its Climatic Research Unit over more than two decades.

There it is - the inquiry panel "was set up by the University of East Anglia" -- no surprise they didn't find any fault. This is why the panel should have been independent rather than set up by East Anglia.

Meanwhile, dissent continues. The Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens sees credibility of the global warming scare crumble and proposes a reader's contest to "invent the next panic". Quote:

So global warming is dead, nailed into its coffin one devastating disclosure, defection and re-evaluation at a time. Which means that pretty soon we're going to need another apocalyptic scare to take its place.

And Professor Richard Lindzen, meteorologist at MIT writes in the Wall Street Journal article Climate Science in Denial on the occasion of Earth Day 2010:

The general approach of the official scientific community (at least in the United States and the United Kingdom) has been to see whether people will bother to look at the [climategate] files in detail (for the most part they have not), and to wait until time diffuses the initial impressions in order to reassert the original message of a climate catastrophe that must be fought with a huge measure of carbon control.   This reassertion, however, continues to be suffused by illogic, nastiness and outright dishonesty.

Richard Lindzen concludes:

But it is unwise to assume that those who have carved out agendas to exploit the issue will simply let go without a battle. One can only hope that the climate alarmists will lose so that we can go back to dealing with real science and real environmental problems such as assuring clean air and water. The latter should be an appropriate goal for Earth Day.

We predict that global warming alarmism will vanish - eventually - and be swept onto the trash heap of history, together with the ice age scare of th 1970s, acid rain, the ozone hole, the dying forests, and that large number of scares that we had to endure since the 1960s for varying periods of time.

REFERENCES

[1] Hansen JE, Sato M, Lacis A, et al. Climate forcings in the Industrial era. PNAS 1998; 95: 12753-12758.
[2] Roe GH, Baker MB. Why Is Climate Sensitivity So Unpredictable? Science 2007; 318: 629-632.
[3] Douglass DH, Pearson BD, Singer F, et al. Disparity of tropospheric and surface temperature trends: New evidence. Geophys Res Lett 2004; 31: L13207.
[4] Douglass DH, Pearson BD, Singer F. Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation. Geophys Res Lett 2004; 31: L13208.
[5] Wishart I. Climate Centre hacked. TGIF edition (PDF).

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