[Vision2020] Hacked Climate Reseach Unit E-mails: 1,092 Responses to “The CRU hack”

[Ted Moffett]

The private communications of competitive professionals in any field
would expose emotions, thoughts and behavior that would reveal them to be
human beings, with the flaws many human beings possess.  That climate
scientists have these flaws is not in the least a surprise.  These flaws
would still exist among scientists in climate science, whether the issue of
anthropogenic climate change became a political or economic issue, or not.
A percentage of professionals in any field have lied, distorted data,
plagiarized, attacked others in their field, became angry or vengeful, etc.
Doctors engage in malpractice somewhere every day of the week, but this does
not mean modern medical science is a hoax or a conspiracy.

The Wall Street Journal piece on these hacked e-mails is lacking a thorough
analysis of what these e-mails reveal or do not reveal, coming from climate
scientists who understand these issues in detail, both professionally,
scientifically and personally.  The Realclimate.org discussion of this issue
offers a wide ranging and detailed analysis.  The thread became so long
(1,092 responses to the original discussion) that Realclimate.org started a
new thread under the same topic.  Below is pasted in only the
Realclimate.org comments before the discussions begin, for both threads.
The full discussions can be read at the website links:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/#more-1853
 The CRU hack
Filed under:

   - Climate Science<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/>

— group @ 20 November 2009

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the Climate
Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia webmail server were
hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has
absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely
separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into
of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of
how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is
unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were
made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the
hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their
possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly
edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are
being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them
involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we
ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU
folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some
paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

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).

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.

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. People working constructively to improve joint
publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big
picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’
discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of
their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it
wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research
to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will
generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that
science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a
useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because
Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because
different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the
truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same
scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for
instance is thus even more remarkable.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will
be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil
Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated
that “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) and from 1961 for
Keith’s to hide the decline.” 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. 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<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/progress-in-millennial-reconstructions/>)
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.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if
cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only
response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on
climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

There are of course lessons to be learned. Clearly no-one would have gone to
this trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of
European butterflies. That community’s internal discussions are probably
safe from the public eye. But it is important to remember that emails do
seem to exist forever, and that there is always a chance that they will be
inadvertently released. Most people do not act as if this is true, but they
probably should.

It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people should not have been
so open with their thoughts, but who amongst us would really be happy to
have all of their email made public?

Let he who is without PIN cast the the first stone.

*Update:* The official UEA statement is as follows:

“We are aware that information from a server used for research information
in one area of the university has been made available on public websites,”
the spokesman stated.

“Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm
that all of this material is genuine.”

“This information has been obtained and published without our permission
and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from
operation.”

“We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved
the police in this enquiry.”

-----------------------------
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/
 The CRU hack: Context
Filed under:

   - Climate Science<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/>

— gavin @ 23 November 2009

This is a continuation of the last
thread<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/>which
is getting a little unwieldy. The emails cover a 13 year period in
which many things happened, and very few people are up to speed on some of
the long-buried issues. So to save some time, I’ve pulled a few bits out of
the comment thread that shed some light on some of the context which is
missing in some of the discussion of various emails.

   - *Trenberth:* You need to read his recent
paper<http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf>on
quantifying the current changes in the Earth’s energy budget to
realise
   why he is concerned about our inability currently to track small
   year-to-year variations in the radiative fluxes.
   - *Wigley:* The concern with sea surface temperatures in the 1940s stems
   from the paper by Thompson et al
(2007)<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/of-buckets-and-blogs/>which
identified a spurious discontinuity in ocean temperatures. The impact
   of this has not yet been fully corrected for in the HadSST data set, but
   people still want to assess what impact it might have on any work that used
   the original data.
   - *Climate Research and peer-review:* You should read about the
issues<http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/deja_vu_all_over_again/>from
the editors (Claire
   Goodess <http://www.sgr.org.uk/climate/StormyTimes_NL28.htm>, Hans von
   Storch <http://coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/CR-problem/cr.2003.htm>) who
   resigned because of a breakdown of the peer review process at that journal,
   that came to light with the particularly
egregious<http://web.archive.org/web/20070608113014/http://w3g.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/storch/pdf/Soon.EosForum20032.pdf>(and
well-publicised) paper by Soon
   and Baliunas
(2003)<http://web.archive.org/web/20070608113014/http://w3g.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/storch/pdf/soon+baliunas.cr.2003.pdf>.
   The publisher’s assessment is
here<http://www.int-res.com/articles/misc/CREditorial.pdf>.


I can update this if there is a demand. Please let me know in the comments,
which, as always, should be substantive, non-insulting on on topic.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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