Responses to the Climate Change Email Hacks
As probably everyone knows, last week hundreds of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were released online by hackers. This act has generated incredible amounts of verbiage in the blogosphere and mainstream media, with climate change deniers seizing this opportunity to denounce the whole enterprise as some sort of labyrinthine global conspiracy
I'm not going to add to this debate here, but given the subject of this blog and the fact that I obviously am concerned about anthropogenic global warming it seemed right for me to at least acknowledge the controversy and post a list of the best responses to the CRU hacks. In summary, I think it is very damaging for some of the scientists involved and a bad PR exercise on behalf of the UEA. But I do not think it comes close to discrediting climate science as a whole, and there's certainly no vast conspiracy at work here.
The Island of Doubt: The hacked climate science scandal that wasn't
What's interesting is how rapidly the climate denial blogosphere has latched onto this as proof that the entire climatology community are in on a scheme to defraud the world. And why whoever the hackers are would think that this material was actually all that interesting in the first place. The hacking of the data is a worthwhile story, insofar as IT security goes, but the content is just plain banal. All we learn is that scientists are humans after all.
Boing Boing: More insight on those leaked climate change emails
This would-be scandal ought to be a learning opportunity--a chance for scientists to educate the public on the evidence for climate change. And while there is plenty of that going on, there's also a lot of people making arguments like, "we shouldn't even be talking about the content of the emails because they are stolen property." Well, you're right, they are stolen property and, technically, should be left private. But you know what? Skeptics of climate change are using these emails, no matter what you think. If experts and researchers refuse to address them, it's just going to mean that the only narrative the public hears is the one that thinks the emails are proof of conspiracy. Not helpful.
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.
This RealClimate.org thread and its follow-up really do the best job of discrediting the discrediters, digging deeply into the science behind the soundbites in the emails.
The Energy Collective: Do Leaked Emails Undermine the Scientific Consensus?
The basic issue here that many of those responding from the climate change community seem unable or unwilling to grasp is that their real problem is not how particular individuals or groups might exploit this information, but how the information itself could undermine the faith of the public in the integrity of climate science. I use the word faith deliberately, because for most of us it boils down to that. The number of people actually equipped to read the scientific papers in question and ascertain whether the manipulation of charts and data implicated in some of the leaked emails is serious or not is vanishingly small, compared to the much larger number of us who must simply take it on faith that the scientists studying the climate and reporting on alarming changes in it are behaving in a fair, transparent, and unself-interested way, to the greatest extent humanly possible. It would be hard for most of us to read the emails in question objectively and not have that faith shaken, at least a bit.
Grist: Skeptics claim global warming is fake after top scientists' emails hacked at CRU
The legitimate climate scientists over at RealClimate have an indepth response to the allegations being made against the CRU folks, some of whom are RealClimate contributors. While conceding that “hide” was a poor choice of words, they translate the science slang at work here: “Scientists often use the term ‘trick’ to refer to ‘a good way to deal with a problem,’ rather than something that is ‘secret.”
“It sounds incriminating,” Michael Mann told Andrew Revkin of The New York Times about his email exchange with Phil Jones. “But when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there.”
Washington Post: Science historian reacts to hacked climate emails
[Spencer Weart:] I don't expect this to have much impact on public perceptions of climate and climate scientists. Opinions have become so fixed that it would take serious evidence to shift a significant number of people. Since the late 1980s, just about every year and sometimes almost every month, a group of people (mostly the same ones) have exclaimed, "Now in these latest (whatever) we finally have proof that there is no need to worry about climate change!" There is a segment of the public that has believed every new claim. The rest will continue to doubt such claims in the absence of truly solid proof.
Skeptical Science: What do the hacked CRU emails tell us?
What do the suggestive "tricks" and "hiding the decline" mean? Is this evidence of a nefarious climate conspiracy? "Mike's Nature trick" refers to the paper Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries (Mann 1998), published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann. The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.
The "decline" refers to the "divergence problem". This is where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed as early as 1998, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature.
George Monbiot: Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away
It is true that much of what has been revealed could be explained as the usual cut and thrust of the peer review process, exacerbated by the extraordinary pressure the scientists were facing from a denial industry determined to crush them. One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
One of these papers which was published in the journal Climate Research turned out to be so badly flawed that the scandal resulted in the resignation of the editor-in-chief. Jones knew that any incorrect papers by sceptical scientists would be picked up and amplified by climate change deniers funded by the fossil fuel industry, who often – as I documented in my book Heat – use all sorts of dirty tricks to advance their cause. Even so, his message looks awful. It gives the impression of confirming a potent meme circulated by those who campaign against taking action on climate change: that the IPCC process is biased. However good the detailed explanations may be, most people aren't going to follow or understand them. Jones's statement, on the other hand, is stark and easy to grasp
Climate Change Denial: Swiftboating the climate scientists
The denial industry (and hordes of climate nerds) has trawled through these e-mails and found sentences which, when removed from context, support their storyline that climate science is being deliberately distorted and exaggerated for a mixed bag of self interested and politicized ends.
Phew. That's a pretty long list!
How about a couple of more light-hearted responses to end?
George Monbiot: The Knights Carbonic
But do these revelations justify the sceptics’ claims that this is “the final nail in the coffin” of global warming theory? Not at all. They damage the credibility of three or four scientists. They raise questions about the integrity of one or perhaps two out of several hundred lines of evidence. To bury manmade climate change, a far wider conspiracy would have to be revealed.
Carbon Fixated: Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance science
When you read some of these letters, you realise just why Newton and his collaborators might have preferred to keep them confidential. This scandal could well be the biggest in Renaissance science. These alleged letters – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists behind really hard math lessons – suggest: Conspiracy, collusion in covering up the truth, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
事件は以下のようにニュースで紹介され、その似顔絵の素晴らしい出来栄えが話題を集めました。スペイン語なので何を言っているのかわかりませんが、アナウンサーの口調とシリアスな音楽も相まって実にシュールな映像となっています。
ボリビアの警察の捜査能力が非常に高いということも考えられますが、「犯罪科学の証拠というよりは子どものらくがきのようである」と評されていたこの似顔絵が、実は特徴を的確にとらえた秀逸なものだったのかもしれません。
似顔絵と容疑者の写真（合成）を並べてみるとこんな感じ。
