Climategate: The Real Story - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 144

RealClimate was posted on Stephen McIntyre's climateaudit Web site. 2 Digital forensics reported by
the Guardian indicated that the hacker was based in eastern North America; 3 that, combined with
what was known about another incident earlier that year, led the Guardian journalist to question
whether McIntyre might somehow have been involved, 4 a possibility that McIntyre strenuously
denied. Saudi Web servers were among the first used to post the stolen materials, 5 and Saudi Arabia
was the first country to call for an investigation of climate scientists in what came to be known as
climategate, 6 leading some to suggest that Saudi Arabia—the world's single largest exporter of oil—
may have played a role. 7 In any case, the lead Saudi climate change negotiator, Mohammad Al-
Sabban, was quick to use the manufactured scandal to help block progress at the Copenhagen summit.
The e-mails would have a “huge impact” on the negotiations, he had predicted, and he went on to
make the jaw-dropping claim that “it appears from the details of the scandal that there is no
relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change.” 8
Although we had intercepted the hacker before our site could be used to complete the mission, it
was clear that the point of no return had been passed. The same content would be uploaded two days
later to a Russian FTP server 9 and then onto many other Web sites, including the Wikileaks site. Soon
enough, this trove of stolen e-mail messages would be released to the world. What ensued in the
weeks ahead was one of the best-coordinated “swiftboat” campaigns in modern history. 10 While the
hackers appear to have had access to the materials for months, the release was clearly timed for the
run-up to Copenhagen.
The Distortions
As soon as the e-mails were leaked, climate change deniers claimed that they provided a “smoking
gun,” “the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming.” 11 The e-mails, they claimed,
revealed that climate scientists had been fabricating and hiding data, subverting the peer review
system, and evading requests for their data. Is it possible they were right?
It would indeed have been surprising if those looking to make mischief could not find some e-
mail excerpts that could be made to appear damning, given the opportunity of searching thousands of
e-mails for phrases to take out of context. To show how easy this was to do, one commentator mined
the personal correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and found phrasing that, taken out of context, could
be interpreted to suggest (in modern terms) “conspiring to avoid public scrutiny,” (2) “insulting
dissenting scientists,” (3) “manipulation of evidence,” (4) “suppression of evidence,” (5) “abusing
the peer review system,” and (6) “insulting [his] critics.” 12
Imagine how unpleasant it might be to have your private e-mails, text messages, or phone
conversations mined by your worst enemy for anything that, taken out of context, could be used to
make you look bad. Then imagine what it would be like to be expected to defend each and every
instance of sloppy word choice or ambiguous phrasing that could be found. This is the position in
which climate scientists whose e-mails had been hacked found themselves.
One e-mail Phil Jones of CRU sent to my coauthors and me in early 1999 has received more
attention than any other. In it, Jones both made reference to “Mike's Nature trick” and used the phrase
“to hide the decline” in describing a figure he had been asked to prepare for the World
Meteorological Organization (WMO) comparing different proxy temperature reconstructions. Here