[Vision2020] The Guardian: "This climate email-hacking episode is generating more heat than light"

[Ted Moffett]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-sceptics-email-hacking

This climate email-hacking episode is generating more heat than light

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate
scientists and so-called sceptics, and this one is likely to lead to more
public confusion

 Bob Ward
guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>, Friday 20 November 2009 20.40
GMT
*• Bob Ward is Policy and Communications Director at the **Grantham Research
Institute on Climate Change and the
Environment*<http://www2.lse.ac.uk/granthamInstitute/>
* at the London School of Economics and Political Science*

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate
scientists and so-called sceptics, with the hacking of email messages
between some of the world's leading
researchers<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-sceptics-hackers-leaked-emails>on
global temperature trends. But as usually happens in the blogosphere,
this episode is generating more heat than
light<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/#more-1853>and
is likely to lead to more public confusion over the causes of climate
change <http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change>.

For the past few years, a small group of climate change
'sceptics'<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change-scepticism>have
been poring over scientific journal papers that report historical
trends in temperatures from around the world, as recorded by directly by
thermometers and other instruments, and by 'proxies', such as tree rings.
Their primary objective has been to seek out evidence that global warming
has been invented by climate researchers who fake their data.

Among their main targets have been papers published by research teams led by
Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University and Phil Jones at the
University of East Anglia, and particularly those featuring the famous 'hockey
stick' graph<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-regarding-the-hockey-stick/>,
showing that average temperature in the northern hemisphere was relatively
stable and constant for most of the last couple of millennia, but rose
dramatically upwards in the last 100 years. This graph appeared prominently
in the landmark Third Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change in
2001<http://www1.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/assessments-reports.htm>,
which concluded that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is
likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations".

The attacks on the hockey stick graph led the United States National Academy
of Sciences to carry out an
investigation<http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11676>,
concluding in 2006 that although there had been no improper conduct by the
researchers, they may have expressed higher levels of confidence in their
main conclusions than was warranted by the evidence.

The 'sceptics' believe they have been vindicated and have presented the
hockey stick graph as proof that global warming is not occurring. In doing
so, they have ignored the academy's other conclusion that "surface
temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only
one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic
warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the
primary evidence".

More importantly, these skeptics have not overturned the well-established
basic physics of the greenhouse effect, namely that carbon dioxide is a
greenhouse gas and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere causes the
earth to warm. They also have not managed to make melting glaciers and
rising sea levels, or any other evidence of warming, disappear into thin
air. But they have managed to confuse some of the
public<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/mar/04/climate-change-creationist-denier-sceptic>about
the causes of climate change.

Over the past five years, Mann and Jones in particular have been subjected
not only to legitimate scrutiny by other researchers, but also to a
co-ordinated campaign of personal attacks on their reputation by 'sceptics'.
If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate researchers
are human, and that they speak badly in private about 'sceptics' who accuse
them of fraud.

It is inevitable as we approach the crucial meeting in conference in
Copenhagen in December that the sceptics would try some stunt to try to
undermine a global agreement on climate change. There is no smoking gun, but
just a lot of smoke without fire.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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