Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU) in November 2009, just a few
weeks before the Copenhagen Conference. 1,073 email exchanges, spanning 13
years of correspondence, between scientists at the CRU and Professor Mann of the
Pennsylvania State University and other US scientists were copied onto the Internet.
Certain phrases from them were then quoted out of context as 'proof' of duplicity of
the climate scientists concerned. Much of the stolen material had been written by
climate experts whose papers had been extensively cited in reports by the IPCC. A
few examples of the way the expressions were distorted will suffi ce: an email from
the head of the Unit, Professor Phil Jones, reads: 'I've just completed Mike's Nature
trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (from 1981
onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline'. The word 'trick' is a jargon
term for clever 'method' of data handling used by scientists, referring in this case to
the linkage of different types of data, while the 'decline' concerns proxy tempera-
tures derived from tree ring analyses.
Another example is an email from Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis
Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado:
We are not close to balancing the energy budget. … The fact is that we can't account for the
lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
Even long before the email theft, the researchers at the CRU had been harassed
by multiple freedom of information requests, which led to resentment on their part,
as they regarded the need to respond as a waste of their time. Professor Jones acted
less than diplomatically vis-a-vis the main requestor:
Many of us in the paleo fi eld get requests from skeptics (mainly a guy called Steve McIntyre
in Canada) asking us for series. Mike and I are not sending anything … mostly because he'll
distort and misuse them (7/5/2004).
And 'Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?'
(29/5/2008)
On 24 November, the University of East Anglia issued a statement on the con-
tents of the emails:
There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by
CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the
highest quality of scientifi c investigation and interpretation.
In total, eight panels on both sides of the Atlantic exonerated both the scientists
of the CRU and their correspondents in the USA, although
[t]he [Muir Russell] Review found an ethos of minimal compliance (and at times non-
compliance) by the CRU with both the letter and the spirit of the FoIA and EIR. We believe
that this must change”. The Review also made it clear that CRU did not receive enough
support from UEA management, and made recommendations to the university on how it
should handle future information requests. (Report, July 2010)
(Data from Powell 2011 : Chapter 14 and Wight 2010 ; Cook, SkepticalScience 2014)
Search WWH ::




Custom Search