Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Climategate
In November 2009 just before the Copenhagen Climate Conference there was an illegal re-
lease, due to hacking, of thousands of emails and other documents from the University of
East Anglia's (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU). This sparked the infamous 'Climateg-
ate scandal'. Allegations were made that the emails revealed misconduct within the climate
science community including withholding scientific information, preventing papers being
published, deleting raw data, and manipulating data to make the case for climate change to
appear stronger than it is. Three independent inquiries since then have concluded that there
was no evidence of scientific malpractice. But what it does show is the power of the media
and how a story is as good as the coverage it gets, not whether it is true or not. So for the
first few days after the emails were released and key phrases and exchanges were put on-
line most science journalists ignored the story. As far as they were concerned this is exactly
how scientists behave and it was not telling them anything new. Then the chief editors got
involved as this was a story and clearly they thought the science journalists had gone nat-
ive, so the story was passed to the political journalists just in time for the Copenhagen con-
ference. But of course what these journalists and editors ignored was that at least two other
highly respected groups at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had used different raw data sets
and different statistical approaches and had published the very same conclusions as the
UEA group. This was further supported in 2012 when Professor Richard Muller, a physicist
and previously a climate change sceptic, and his Berkeley group published their collated
global temperature records for the last 200 years, when he publicly announced he had
changed his mind and that climate change was occurring due to human activity. This
demonstrates how non-science journalists appear to have no concept of the 'weight of evid-
ence', discussed in
Chapter 3
.
Central to the criticism that the UEA group and by extension other climate scientists had
changed the raw data was the potentially misleading short-hand terminology used by sci-
entist such as 'correct', 'trick', 'tweak', 'manipulate', 'a line', 'correlate'. Some raw data
does need to be processed so it can be compared with other data, particularly if you are try-
ing to make long records of temperature when the methods used to measure temperature
have changed. The clearest example of this is the measurement of sea temperature, which
over the last 150 years has varied from a bucket of seawater hoisted on deck to direct meas-
urements on seawater taken into a ships' engine. If scientists just stuck all this raw data to-
gether it would of course be inaccurate. Moreover, in this case because the earlier sea-sur-
face temperature measurements are too cold without correction it would make global
